


In Full Measure I Return To You

by thearrogantemu



Series: To Morning Through the Shadow [1]
Category: The Silmarillion and other histories of Middle-Earth - J. R. R. Tolkien
Genre: AU - Celebrimbor wins, Alternate Ending for These Gifts That You Have Given Me, Backpacking in the Blessed Realm, Blatant Appropriation of Laws and Customs of the Eldar, Death and Rebirth, Don't Try This At Home, Emotional Abuse, Eregion, Fade to Math, Fanfiction of Fanfiction, Forgiveness and its limits, Halls of Mandos, M/M, Many Awkward Conversations, Moral maturity is difficult okay, Reconciliation, Sauron's (un)Sexy Conlang, Second Age, The Most Self-Indulgent Thing I Have Ever Written, Theomachy by Other Means, Torture, Trauma and recovery, Vader Gambit (There Is Good In Him I've Felt It), Well-Intentioned Extremist Sauron, canon-divergent, soulbonding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-09-03
Updated: 2017-04-23
Packaged: 2018-08-12 19:58:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 3
Words: 64,974
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7947121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thearrogantemu/pseuds/thearrogantemu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Think about it. What if you get everything you want? What if this works? What if, in pain and in the fear of pain, I yield to your will? Where you once had a friend, you will now have a cringing slave. Then, Annatar, and only then, will we both be lost beyond recall.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. One

**Author's Note:**

  * For [sumeria](https://archiveofourown.org/users/sumeria/gifts).
  * Inspired by [These Gifts That You Have Given Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/4781201) by [thearrogantemu](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thearrogantemu/pseuds/thearrogantemu). 



> In [_These Gifts That You Have Given Me_](http://archiveofourown.org/works/4781201?view_full_work=true) Celebrimbor faced Sauron, his friend and colleague, in an attempt to call him back from that darkness into which he had cast himself at the forging of the One Ring. It failed, Celebrimbor perished, and Sauron went on to become the Dark Lord of Mordor.
> 
> But what if Celebrimbor won?
> 
> This is an alternate outcome of the relationship built up in _These Gifts That You Have Given Me_ , for everyone - all right, for _me_ \- who wanted to believe that things could have been different between Our Hero and Our Villain. Everything prior to the events described here may be consider to have taken place exactly as in _Gifts_ \- the only points of divergence are clearly indicated in the fic.
> 
> Sumeria, this is your  
> a: fault  
> b: work  
> c: gift  
> d: all of the above.

_Evil has every advantage but one: it is inferior in imagination_

_-W. H. Auden_

* * *

 

 

**Eregion, The Second Age, 1697  
** **Midwinter’s Day**

 

Awareness was coming back to his friend. From its motionless stupor, his quick mind sparked back to living flame, and his own thought flared in answer, all warmth and light. There was a deep satisfaction to it, like that he had felt when he first put on the Ring: the world falling into order and strength and beauty at his will. He combed his fingers affectionately through the dark hair, teasing out the places where blood still matted it into great clumps and stuck it to the skin of the shoulders and the back. Beneath the blood, both dried and fresh, the flesh was once again whole and sound.

It was more than merely repairing the damage to the body. That would have happened on its own, given time. The renewed life forced into the flesh of the man on the table before him was a direct translation of his own will. The Ring’s power flowed through his friend like blood, like breath, and he knew that nothing, not the most obdurate will nor the deepest of arts, could stand before it. There was relief in that knowledge; contentment and safety.

But under his satisfaction, at once feeding it and inflaming it, anger burned like liquid stone. The infuriating necessity of having to be in this position at all – the unaccountable foolishness that had brought his friend to this point –

His fingers closed to a fist, tugging at the hair, lifting his head. The repair had indeed been successful, for now at the pressure his friend groaned, coughed, and shuddered into true waking. A tremor ran through his body and his hand came up as if reaching for something. He took it in his own, gently but as securely as an iron vise. There was a brief struggle, an instinctive resistance at finding himself caught, but reaching across his shoulder and supporting him, Annatar helped him find his way to sitting upright on the table. He swayed there, his breath shallow, before raising his head.

Blinking, he noted his surroundings: the Great Workshop of the Brotherhood of the Jewelsmiths, the diagrams and models still on the walls, the thin winter sunlight through the high windows. All was undisturbed. Annatar watched patiently as he tested the evidence of his senses against that of his memory. _Surely I was somewhere else? Surely I was hurt?_

When Celebrimbor saw whose embrace he was leaning against, there was a moment of disorientation; his eyes clouded then cleared. He seemed to be running through possible responses as methodically as if he were testing for fit in a function — relief, terror, sorrow, desperation, rage – finally settling on something cold and sharp that might have been resolve, or might have been mere irritation.

“ _You_ ,” said Celebrimbor with a sigh.

An answering smile lit Annatar’s face; brilliant, innocent, bright as an arclight, flat and empty as a sketch of a carved face. He held him for a moment – slightly longer than was necessary – to establish that his friend was not about to topple over, then stepped back and regarded him with deep contentment.

Celebrimbor was not looking at him; he was, in his old experimental manner, testing the repairs made to his body.  The way the mended muscles bunched and stretched across his back, the expansion of the chest with the drawn breath, the range of motion of the arms. He moved slowly, cautiously, not troubling to conceal the instability he felt.

“This is better, isn’t it?” Annatar said quietly, watching him test the articulation of his fingers, the movement of the skilled hands as graceful and precise as it had ever been. Irritation flickered again over Celebrimbor’s mind. He could not deny the truth of the words, though: it was better to be healed than injured, better to be free than bound, better to be back in the warmth and light of Annatar’s favor than in the fire of his displeasure. As he clearly had no counterargument, Celebrimbor settled for raising his head and glaring at him.

“Well,” he said bitterly, “I trust that little exercise of power allowed you to settle whatever argument you were having with yourself.”

Shifting his robes aside, Annatar sat down on the table beside him. “I hope you’re not under the impression I found that somehow enjoyable. I told you once already: I do not want to see you hurt.” _The skin tearing, the strong frame collapsing, the brilliant mind shivering into fragments of agony and terror —_

“It must have been terrible for you,” said Celebrimbor, entirely straight-faced. “If only someone could have stopped it.”

“ _Someone_ could have,” retorted Annatar sharply. “At any time. Tyelperinquar, you know the terms. You know what I’m offering you. Stop this posturing. I don’t like this any more than you do.”

“My heart bleeds for you.” The sympathy in Celebrimbor’s voice was a slightly less skillful mimicry of truth than Annatar’s smile. “Or, wait, not my heart, but something, anyway.” He put his fingers to his hair and drew them away fouled with drying blood.

“Stop sulking. You’re entirely whole. The Ring works on living matter as well as on inert – don’t worry, I tested it exhaustively before I used it on you. You can feel it yourself, of course, how well it works. You cannot help but know what this means. What I can do.” He turned to Celebrimbor, who had dropped his head again, and seemed to be deep in thought. He gently raised it with one hand. “What _we_ can do, Tyelperinquar...”

He let Celebrimbor take his hand and examine it, but he pulled it away sharply when he moved to touch the Ring where it gleamed on his finger.

“I do know it now.” Celebrimbor’s voice was quiet and his mouth was dry. “Your will at work within me, pinning together the things you’ve broken... Well, now I suppose I know how it feels to be that Great Tower of yours, to be matter forced into your preferred arrangement without regard to—”

“My _preferred arrangement_ ,” Annatar said, standing back up and going to the water spigots along the workshop wall, “is the restoration of this forsaken world, the raising of these marred shores to heights surpassing the dreams of those beyond the sea.” He took a wide ceramic bowl from the shelves above the water spigots and inspected it briefly for chemical residues before filling it with water. “You shared that vision once. You spoke of how we would heal the world, you and I. I have not forgotten, even if you have.” He padded back to his friend and offered him the water. “There. Pull yourself together.”

Celebrimbor drained the bowl in a single draft – he must have been cripplingly thirsty. Even without the blood loss, effort and stress would have drained fluid from the tissues of the body. When Annatar brought him more water, he drank half of it, but then with the other half he washed the blood and filth from his face. Instinctively he reached for Annatar’s flowing sleeve to dry his face, a thoughtless gesture, centuries old, that had begun as a playful trial of his visitor’s powers. There was a momentary pause as he realized what he was doing, then with a slight shrug he continued.

For a moment they might have been at work together again, with Celebrimbor mopping sweat or forge-soot off his face after a long work day. Annatar glowed with the pleasure of it; no matter his determined recalcitrance Celebrimbor could not fail to appreciate how much better it was to be back together again, working in partnership rather than fighting a losing battle alone against an overwhelming force.

Celebrimbor released his sleeve, which had taken no marks from its use. He still seemed to be thinking hard, but he had not sunk back into himself. It was less like he was working out an unusually difficult theoretical problem, and more like he was working out a complex and urgent physical challenge — how to remove a fragile cast without breaking it, perhaps, or cool an overheating furnace without an explosion.

He looked back up at Annatar. “You’re not accustomed to distinguishing between repair and healing, are you?” he said. “In that, that _language_ of yours, they aren’t even separate words, are they?”

They were not, but Annatar felt no inclination to concede him the point. “The Speech is an economical language, Tyelperinquar; it does not allow for imprecise expression or duplication of word function. It would, however,” he added, “allow you to express in words what now you seem to be trusting tone of voice to convey, if you add _ekh,_ the particle of contempt, to the clause designating language –”

Celebrimbor was laughing, or at any rate breathing hard; the quick stuttering breaths might have been the precursor either to laughter or tears. Annatar gave him a few minutes to settle on one or the other before pressing him forward with “Yes?”

“Why do I _like_ you?” Celebrimbor gasped out. It was laughter, then. “Look at you, still ankle-deep in the blood of my city, my friends, still covered in the dust of everything that we worked for together, carrying on about language construction as if we were sitting around a tea-brazier with Alagos and Naugwen!”

His lips tightened. “The losses in the Mirdain were a waste, Tyelperinquar, a waste that you could have averted at any time. It was through your own choice that I returned to this city with war rather than —”

“Don’t _try_ that with me, Annatar, don’t even begin to try it.” Celebrimbor glared at him. “I don’t care about your excuses, I am not interested in your deflections; you are not going to shuffle off the responsibility for the deaths _you_ ordered, the destruction _you_ caused, onto me.”

Annatar smiled. “Your innocence is not something I would have thought you so invested in preserving, heir of Fëanor. Still, believe what you will of yourself! Believe anything you like, only come back to me, yield me my Rings, so that this can be over and we can start again.”

“My innocence?” He really was laughing now. “I have chosen _you_ , Annatar, I think innocence is out of the question.”

Annatar stepped back, feeling his friend stir and attempt to rise. “Can I rely on you not to do anything exceptionally stupid?” he said, offering him a hand that he did not take. “You can try making a dash for the door, of course, but my people are behind it, and this time I would have to break something and leave it broken.”

Gingerly, with one hand on his shoulder for balance, Celebrimbor eased himself down off the table onto the stone floor of the workshop. He seemed surprised to find that his legs bore him up without trembling.

“My strength is not...”

“Drained? No, of course it isn’t. I have been generous to you, Tyelperinquar; I will be more generous yet, if only you will let me. I do not want you broken. I do not want you diminished.” He took him by the shoulders, leaning towards him. He spoke, low and urgent, into his ear. “You will not die, you cannot die; I will not let you die. If you die, then the Three, your great works, must be destroyed, and I will not have that happen. You are clearly determined to be as stubborn an ass about it as possible, but I know, I know there is something in you that will be worth any effort to save. We can still salvage the mess you have made of our work; I can still save you.”

Celebrimbor put up a hand to Annatar’s on his shoulder, touched it as if he meant to keep it there. He shook his head. “You really do think we’re negotiating. What did you do, pour your good sense into that Ring along with, what was it, the greater part of your soul? Very well, let me restate your case. You want me to give you the Three because, firstly, you consider yourself to have some sort of right to them as a creator, and secondly, because you see them as a necessary component in your plans for the world, and thirdly, because you will destroy me in body and soul if I withhold them; do I understand your argument correctly?”

“Is that really what you’ve taken from this?” Annatar found himself relieved; had he been anticipating something more difficult? He pulled his hand free to brush Celebrimbor’s hair back behind his ear. “It was not your way to be so petty, my bright one, at any rate not before your grandfather’s madness took hold upon you and led you to set your possessiveness and pride above the world’s welfare.”

“Am I wrong?” Celebrimbor insisted, cutting him off. The reference to his grandfather did not affect him at all; Annatar quietly discarded it as an angle of attack.

“Wrong? You are neither asking nor answering the right question.  Raise your eyes, Tyelperinquar. Look to the work that is greater than either of us, yes, greater even than me. Look to the work that raised us both from the wreckage of the past.” His voice dropped. “You saw that once; I saw it in you. It is within our grasp now, if you will only reach out your hand for it.” They were still facing each other, eye to eye, closer than conversation needed to be, as if any minute they might begin to grapple, or to embrace.

“ _Greatness, grasp_...” Celebrimbor sounded out the syllables as if the language was unknown to him. “You can still say the words, Annatar, but there’s no meaning to them; you’re reaching out for _nothing._ What you’ve done to our city —”

He clearly had not heard a word being said to him. “Oh, Tyelperinquar. Still on your own injured pride? With all this before us? Look.”

It was not necessary to touch him to send the images pouring into his mind. Mountains moved, rivers shifted, cities fell and rose again, flying the banners of the Black Hand. Orc-hordes were turned to disciplined formations, armies drilled in the plains, roads spread across trackless wastes, cultivated fields sprang up in the arid lands. Decades passed in seconds, and above it all, vast as the mountains, stood the Great Tower, his will made stone.

He let the vision fade, but Celebrimbor stood staring at him, not with awe, but with horror, and that same strange quality he had felt in him before as he groped back to consciousness, that cold thing that might have been resolve or might have been anger, but which resembled nothing more strongly than weakness.

Out of that weakness he spoke, his breath cool against Annatar’s face. “ _That_ is your more beautiful world? Annatar, _look_ at it. Stars and spiders, you’ve made unwilling slaves even of rock and stone.”

“That is its beginning. Now do you see why it is that I need you, why I need the Three? They serve the One, as all the Rings do, with the full subtlety and power of the art of the Eldar. Of your art, your greatest art, which will otherwise rot wasted and hidden, wherever you have concealed them. Your craft must be joined to mine, you must complete in beauty what I have begun in strength.”

“So you _can_ still recognize beauty. Where it is, where it is not...” Celebrimbor spoke quietly; would have been talking to himself if they were not still poised face to face. “You know what you’ve lost, Annatar, something in you does still know –“

“ _Nothing is lost._ Nothing need be lost.”  His anger went rippling through the room; the coals flared in the brazier in the corner. He felt Celebrimbor steel himself as if anticipating a blow, but he called that anger back into himself, back into the smooth perfection and contained power of the One. “You are – he looked with love at the golden circle – “a less perfect expression of my power than some things, but you are mine nonetheless, and your art will be brought into harmony with mine. You are a work in progress, my exquisite one, and there is no reason that you should not take your place at my side, the mightiest of your kind, the greatest of my instruments.”

“Can you still create at all?” Celebrimbor was talking past him, as if he cared nothing for all that was being offered. “Of course not, how could you? You had to make that Ring out of something; you made it out of _yourself_ –“ Now horror and interest were warring in his tone. “You’re not just the wielder, you’re the instrument. How did you _do_ that?  You must have split your – what is the word for it, your existence, your soul, your own nature – but of course that would account for the power in it; if splitting apart the elements of matter releases so much energy how much more splitting apart the core of the self –“

“I’m surprised you need to ask.” In truth, he was more pleased than surprised at having found something to draw Celebrimbor out of his self-absorption. “You had a rudimentary intuitive grasp of the principles involved at your first foray into Ring-craft, and our research – before our disagreement – was already beginning to lay the theoretical groundwork.” He began sketching on the board. The full expression of the theory he had in mind would require considerably more than two dimensions to diagram, but he trusted to the strength of Celebrimbor’s imagination. “You see now, I am sure, why the Three are more than incidentally related to my One. The One is the discipline of Ring-craft itself taken to its inevitable conclusion.

“Without the One, the other rings are scattered individual efforts. Interesting essays in the craft, perhaps, but no more. With the One, the Ruling Ring, they and their wielders are unified and brought into harmony.  There was an element of personal sacrifice in its creation, to be sure. But all great endeavors require sacrifice, and you see how richly I have been rewarded.

“The Powers have a word, _suþâraȝûlûn,_ which signifies...” He tapped his fingers on the board, running through the inadequate approximations in the languages of the Incarnates, “both _indwelling_ and _being poured out._ It is a term for relating to things, as well as to the means by which being is invested into matter.”

Celebrimbor had gone very pale, but as his pulse and breathing showed no evidence of distress, Annatar ignored it. “The greater that investment, the greater the power it offers. Not for nothing, after all, is a ring the signifier of a bond! The— ”

“I lived through the First Age,” said Celebrimbor hoarsely, “I’ve seen mistakes made over jewelry, but I do believe this might surpass them all. Ought I to congratulate you? I never thought to see anyone outdo the wrongs my family did when they bound themselves to the Silmarils, but in sheer self-destructive madness...”

“Stop being unreasonable, Tyelpe. Treating this, the pinnacle of our Art, like that unaccountably foolish Oath by which your ancestors bound themselves _by_ what they could not understand _to_ what they could not control –“

But Celebrimbor drew a long breath. “You may have actually made this simpler. I have considered your argument, and I reject it. Give up that Ring, and I will give you anything you want. Anything at all. Happily.”

Annatar kept his voice deliberately mild. “I don’t think you are in a position to be making bargains, even in jest.”

“You’re right. I’m not making bargains. I’m making demands. And I am demanding your unconditional surrender.”

He whirled from the board in a blur of white robes and a swell of power from the Ring. Though he did not touch him, Celebrimbor could no more stand against that power than a reed in a river, a straw in a furnace; he staggered back blindly against the table.

“Do you want me to admire your spirit?” he hissed.  “I don’t. Enough. Yield, Tyelperinquar, before I make you yield.”

Celebrimbor groped for the edges of the work table, braced himself, and raised his head.

“Do you mean,” Annatar asked, incredulous, “to set your strength against mine?”

Again that strange look came into Celebrimbor’s eyes, as if he were very far away or working out a delicate, crucial problem whose balance a breath might tip. “My strength?” he said, and even his voice was distant. “No.” He laughed quietly. “It’s my will I set against you, Sauron. And the strength I mean to set against you is your own.”

“Your _will_ … You know that it would cost me nothing to burn out your mind and leave you a gibbering wreck.”

“I know.” Celebrimbor was looking past him, through him. “Oh, Annatar. I knew that the first moment I saw you.”

“Do you know?” Annatar spoke very gently. “I don’t think you actually do.”

Even when wearing the form of one of the Eldar, Annatar’s mind did not move like one of theirs, and so the experience of _recognition_ , when it came, was rare and startling. But he recognized the strangeness upon Celebrimbor at last: it was not terror or resolve or irritation or anything else. It was pity.

He sank swiftly into the Ring, into the force and the order and the calm like the center of a flame. The patterns of the world around him grew clear to his sight and fragile to his touch, and he turned his full attention to the knot of desire and defiance that was Celebrimbor’s mind.  

_Yield, or I will make you yield._

There was so little of him; a handful of matter, a tangle of spirit. He had only to send forth a slight vector of power, and as if beneath an unbearable weight, Celebrimbor was forced to his knees and then to the floor.

Muscle and bone and nerve, knowledge and memory, fear and hope and that mad and maddening pity. The Ring tore at him, body and soul, seeking a way in, loosening the bonds that held his being together, like phase transition under intense heat. He was writhing now, helpless, graceless motions in the futile effort to escape what could not be escaped. Annatar’s attention was not a place but a state.

_Yield or I will make you yield._

There was little point to the words that he sent echoing through his mind; Celebrimbor certainly couldn’t speak and it was doubtful that he could comprehend. There was fresh blood on his face and his hands were clawing at empty air, his back arched nearly in two. There was no further point to the demonstration. Annatar released him suddenly and he lay on the floor like the dead.

There had been surprisingly little resistance. He had not called on his own Rings, not even on Fire. Annatar had not really expected him to, but it was interesting that not even in this extremity would he reach reflexively for his weapons.

The senselessness of it burned at him, an irritation like a grain of sand in the eye. They had been side by side again, almost like the old days, peace and strength and power and a place at his side all within Celebrimbor’s grasp, and to throw it away, to choose _this_ over everything that he might have —

He sank to one knee at his side. “Tyelperinquar.”

There was no response, but he knew he had not broken his mind altogether. He had no patience left for this self-indulgence. He struck him across the face, fracturing the bone of the upper jaw. The prisoner could not help but respond to that.

“Tyelperinquar,” he said, calmly and firmly. “I do not want this to happen to you. Please. Let me stop.”

It took a moment for him to be able to speak at all, but his eyes were bright and clear and still showing pity where they should have shown fear. “Yes,” he said through a mouthful of blood. “Surrender now and I will show you mercy.”

Sauron straightened, wiping the blood off his hand with one of the cleaning rags stocked in the workshop. “You can joke all you want, in taste as poor as you please, when we have resolved this disagreement, but right now I really must ask you to focus on the matter at hand.”

“I have never —” He choked and spat; tried to struggle up on one arm but could not keep his balance. “Never been — more focused in my life — you haven’t noticed. Entirely serious. You — yield. While you still can —”

There was no point in reabsorbing his anger any longer. Annatar lifted him bodily back to the surface of the table and began searching through the workshop drawers looking for tools.

“I forgive you. You can stop this. You can come back from this.” The voice went on, quiet and relentless. “And I will die before I give you up.”

The tools in a well-equipped workshop were so marvellously adaptable; he began setting them out on the table by his head. “Why are you _doing_ this?” he asked, laying out a matched set of crimping pliers. “I really hoped, for a moment, that you were prepared to be reasonable, even though your people clearly wanted to fight to the death.”

Celebrimbor was beginning to struggle again. He touched him on the neck and a simple command to the great nerve along the spine took away his power of motion. It would make it easier, what was to come.   

“Why do you think I waited until our defeat was sure before I gave myself into your hands? I will venture even this for the love that I bear you; I could ask no one else to accept it.” Celebrimbor was pushing down panic with words again, endearing and infuriating in equal measure.

“Can you imagine that department meeting?” he went on. Even in his extremity, his imitation of the voice of the Mirdain’s archivist was startlingly accurate. ‘Surrender to Sauron? So you’re going to give him what he wants?!’ ‘No, not voluntarily. You see, I plan on talking him out of his plans for world domination.’ ‘Oh well, go on then, all in favor say aye —”

Annatar laughed to himself. “Your people… What would they say, if they could see you naked here, I wonder?”

“You don’t need to wonder,” Celebrimbor rasped, “you must have heard them as well as I did. _He has betrayed us all.”_

 

* 

 

**Three Days before Midwinter, Afternoon**

 

“You can strip, or they can strip you.” Annatar’s face was set and blank.

They stood, face to face, in the Great Hall, with the winter sun white through the lead-glass dome and Sauron’s troops in ranks around the central dais. Celebrimbor could feel their attention, waiting on their lord’s command.They had been assembled hastily, and nominally for a peace-council, but Sauron must have known as well as he that there would be no peace between them, not now. The troops were still armed, and though a murmur of discomfort whispered through them at the order, they were clearly prepared for it.

They had taken no part in the negotiations — Celebrimbor doubted that any of them even spoke Quenya well enough to follow the speech between him and Annatar — but they must have seen the turns they took, the lightning reverses from conquered leader to honored guest to disgraced prisoner.

Sauron was twisting the Ring on his finger. “It makes no difference to me. I imagine it does to you.”

He was still dressed for battle. The armor designed and forged in the Mirdain over the last century, when they had turned their art toward war instead of knowledge, was light and practical. It could easily be put on and removed by one alone, and Celebrimbor, steadily and deliberately, began undoing clasps and loosening knots, removing arm guards, shin guards, and the plates that covered each shoulder. He set them piece by piece on the table. The sound echoed in the hall. Even the orcs at the edges were silent.

When he had undone the reinforced waist-piece and coiled the red cord with which it had been bound, he paused, looked up, and met Sauron’s eyes. The dark quilted silk he wore beneath the armor was made for use rather than display, but the edges were bright with gold embroidery and the Star of Fëanor was set into the back. Sauron watched him sharply but did not move, and after a moment he removed it too, and felt the cold of the air settling on his skin. Without dropping his gaze, he folded the heavy garments neatly and hung them over the back of the chair.

Unhurried, he removed his adornments one by one – the jewels from ears and throat and wrists, the circlet from his head, the heavy bronze ornaments from his hair. He laid them neatly on the table, but when he came to the clasp that held the braids back from his face, he held it in his hand for a minute, looking at the stones green as summer leaves in the winter light. Then, coolly and with measured step, he walked to Annatar, took his hand, and returned the first of the gifts his friend had given him.

Annatar looked at it, and at his hand, for long enough that Celebrimbor began to sense worry from the gathered troops in the hall: anxiety over what their enigmatic commander could possibly be planning. He heard them breathe more easily as Annatar began to move, stalking around him in a tight circle and examining him carefully, as if he hoped to read something in his person that he could not in the battle-armor or in the robes of his office.

“What do you want?” he asked.

“The Three, Tyelperinquar.” Annatar moved into his field of vision again. Though he seemed pleased to be asked, he spoke firmly; there was compulsion in his voice that would have moved undefended minds to instant obedience.

He scrutinized him as if he were inspecting a jewel for flaws, his face wearing the alert, abstracted attention that Celebrimbor remembered from their days together in the workshop.  He did touch him then, running his hand along the discolored scar that slashed across Celebrimbor’s abdomen from ribcage to the curve of the bone of the hip.

“I haven’t swallowed them,” said Celebrimbor, “if that’s what you’re wondering.”

Sauron did not laugh. “Perhaps not. Though I assure you, Tyelperinquar, it is not your person that is an obstacle to my recovery of what you have stolen.” He closed his hand lightly around his side, and Celebrimbor had the unnerving and unhappy impression that he could shut his fingers without regard to the muscle and skin between them.

Annatar’s thoughts seemed to be running the same direction. “What’s the word that you incarnates use to describe this?” He brushed with his other hand at his own skin, where the collar of his robes parted showing the hollow of the throat. “ _Fana,_ isn’t it? _Veil?_ An unusually accurate choice of terms, for the imprecise language of the Incarnates. You know what flimsy stuff flesh is, and how easily torn.”

“Do you have a point, or did you just want to discuss comparative biology? I dare say you haven’t had much by way of conversation, these last years, but —”

“You seem to think,” Annatar cut him off, cold and serious,  “that because you are of value to me that you can place limits upon my power. You cannot. I do value you, and I will not permit you to withhold from me that which makes you valuable, and I will — rearrange you as necessary to ensure victory.”

Celebrimbor burst out laughing. “Who on earth do you think you’re talking to, Annatar? Or are you having more difficulty with the language than you let on? All right, _rearrangement_ signifies a deliberate alteration in an order or pattern. Given the nakedness and the threats and the roomful of soldiers, my guess is the word you’re looking for is _torture,_ which signifies the deliberate infliction of pain, from the stem _ngwal,_ which I know you recognize as an element in _Cruel_ —”  

But Sauron closed his other hand around his other side and his boldness faltered; his laughter died in his throat, focus returning along with fear.

“You can stop this,” Sauron said quietly. “At any time. I can number all of the particles in your body, Tyelperinquar; you are finite and fragile and made of matter. Do not make me drive the point home.” He took his hands from his sides. “Do not be foolish.”

“I can _make_ you do nothing.”

For a moment this seemed to puzzle Sauron — at any rate he paused again. “No,” he said to himself. “No, it is not such a terrible thing, and you shall be at my side in the end…” He lifted his head. “Give me your hands.”

He clearly did not intend to wait for Celebrimbor’s response, for he was already reaching for him when Celebrimbor took both of his hands in his. Annatar clasped them firmly, almost warmly, as if they were sealing some kind of agreement, but he looked out over Celebrimbor’s shoulder and spoke a word whose very sound stabbed into his head like the most vicious sort of headache. Guardsmen came running up with long strips of a tough cloth, binding his wrists together.

“ _Krimp...il...._ – what language _is_ that, Annatar?

“My own.” Another string of the bloody-edged syllables. The shifting of mailed feet behind him, and a bark of acknowledgement in the same tongue.

“Your — that’s not Valarin.”

“Indeed not.” Annatar had still not let go his hands, though his wrists were lashed against each other. “Valarin can be an exceptionally precise language, but to achieve that precision it sacrifices a certain degree of efficiency, and the Speech is intended above all to be _used._ Men can use it, even Orcs; I designed it to be simple enough to be grasped even by a dulled mind and as you can hear, the words do linger.”

They did linger, as if the sounds themselves were barbed. Celebrimbor’s ears were still stinging with them.

“Take what I just said to my men.” He looked about, as if for a board to start drawing on, but finding none, went on anyway, just as if he were delivering a lecture to a classful of apprentices. “That last word comes from _mber_ , expensive — _berzhug_ , more expensive, _berzhugakh_ , most expensive. The comparative is implied, so the construction is blood-third person singular immediate-intensive-subject marker, life-second person plural-general-direct object marker, expensive-comparative.” He cocked his head slightly to see if Celebrimbor followed.

“One drop of his blood is worth more than... all your lives?” Annatar was clearly pleased with his effort at translation, but Celebrimbor suppressed his instinctive answering smile. “Well, I’d say I’m flattered but I think that says more about the price you set on the lives of your servants than about the price you set on my blood.” He glanced at one of the armed men who had bound him; his stance was poised and aggressive, but his eyes behind the face-mask were miserable and fear pulsed from him in waves.

Annatar was still holding his hands, with the same attention he used to show after a particularly long day of painstaking work, when he would hold Celebrimbor’s hands with greater care even than he gave to his tools: kneading suppleness into cramped muscles, rubbing rosemary oil into the joints. The memory of those times might have been working on him, because when he spoke again, it was quiet, tense, and unhappy.

“Tyelperinquar,” he said, “you can still stop this.”

He grasped his hands. “No. It’s you who can stop this. It’s not going to get easier for you, Annatar; so stop now, stop while you still can —”

Sauron shook himself free. “Well. I wish you weren’t making me do this.”

The soldiers, with an efficiency born of long practice, assembled a tripod and bound the prisoner securely to it. There were a thousand petty tasks that needed doing — the fall of a city was nearly as much trouble as the construction of one, and happened much more quickly — but no task was more urgent than this. He took a seat watching, on the marble bench at the top of the steps leading into the courtyard. The alertness in his troops surged pleasantly: consciousness of their god-king’s presence always spurred them on to great effort.

The prisoner evidently felt his presence too. Celebrimbor tried to turn backwards, to look him in the eyes, but the captain struck him viciously across the shoulders until he dropped his head, gasping, against the post. It occurred to him then that there were other matters that needed to be attended to, that he might be better employed elsewhere, but he had already chosen and now he could not leave.

The guards plied the lash with the same assiduous attention they gave to everything in his presence. They were working to impress, though their squad commander could not tell whether to watch his men, or to watch the Lord of Gifts. At the prisoner’s first cry he saw him smile reflexively, but his golden eyes went suddenly wide and black.

It took an unusually long time. Annatar watched them, unmoving, resting his closed hand against his mouth as a gesture demonstrating reflective consideration, but the guards who were closest to him noticed that he had been pressing the Ring against his lip so hard it left a bloodless indentation in the flesh.

The urge to escape was surprising and misplaced; perhaps he was still too closely attuned to the prisoner’s own reactions. He would not move. He had planned initially to leave his mind resting against his friend’s, to watch the moment when the thread of his awareness snapped. Perhaps thus he could learn something new of its vulnerabilities or something of the secrets that Celebrimbor was so determined to keep. He had been wrong; it was not necessary, and he found himself sharply disinclined to do so. When the prisoner lost consciousness at last, he saw the soldiers leave off what they were doing, ascertaining his condition by the crude physical means that were all that they had at their disposal: pulse, breath, response to touch and sound.

He got up from the bench and paced down through the courtyard, through the blood and the torn bits of flesh to where the prisoner — his friend — hung slack and motionless. The soldiers looked to him: _do we continue?_ A mortal who had been scourged this way would be dead or dying now.

“You said, Lord, that one drop of his blood was worth all of our lives…” the squad commander began. He looked at the ground and did not finish the sentence. There was a lot of blood.

“There are a lot of you,” said Sauron coolly. He put out a hand to touch the face and felt Celebrimbor, astonishingly, struggling back to awareness of himself, of where he was and who was with him. That was surprising; why was he not sending himself away into the depths of dream or stupor?

He tried to speak, muttering a wordless, broken sound against his hand.

“Tyelperinquar,” he said sharply, “Let me stop this.”

Celebrimbor could not raise his head, but he opened his eyes and looked straight at him. Annatar saw him drawing his strength together again; he would not speak and he would not let him go.

He could feel Celebrimbor drawing strength from the act of defiance, clearly determined to make things as difficult as possible for him. It was only to be expected from one of his line, but it was a frustrating habit and he had no time for it. He pulled himself away as if the touch of his skin burned, snapping a command to the soldiers. They took up their whips again, and this time he stood only far enough away as to be out of their radius, ensuring that their work was done, and thoroughly.

 

*

 

**Seven Days past Midwinter**

 

In Khazad-dum, where Celebrimbor had spent long years before the founding of Ost-in-Edhil, the noise from the foundries pulsed through the stone of the mountain. In the foundry hall itself, the sound was so loud it seemed to slip past the boundaries of sense and become a thing to be felt, to be tasted.  Speech should have been impossible on the foundry floor. Even the Eldar would have difficulty understanding each other’s words through the howl of the furnaces and the thunder of the hammers, the hiss and scream of metal being shaped. The Dwarves were less keen of hearing, and packed wool into their ears to protect them.

He had asked Nordri, the smelting-master, how it was that they communicated, submerged in that overwhelming tumult. _“When you cannot go over the mountain, you must go under it,”_ Nordri had pronounced, then chuckled to see the earnestness with which Celebrimbor had noted the Khuzdul proverb. “Not even you could hope to out-shout rock and flame, Master Elf. We cannot speak over the sound, so we must speak under it, with fingers and lips, the motion of the eye and the hand.”

It was pain and not sound now that echoed through him; Sauron was determined to make his point about the limitations of matter. He lost himself from time to time in the thunder and howl of it — day and night seemed to have lost any intelligible sequence — but he thought of the foundries and made no attempt to stand against it or overcome it, but rather to slip beneath it and hold to his purpose.

His own doubts sounded their chittering accompaniment in the clamor. The litany of _why this would not work_ looped over and over through his mind. He let that pass over him too; he was past the point where doubt could turn him from his path.

Sauron bore down on his mind as well as his body, pressing and twisting, searching for weakness, trying to start the reaction that would end in surrender and reconciliation and precipitate out the elements of will. Visions rose before him: his friends, his colleagues, his lost family, still with their death wounds upon them. They whispered pleas and accusations: _why have you laid this all to waste, when you might have had so much?_

“You can’t even get the accent right,” he said to Sauron, and waited until they faded from his sight. “You were looking for the worst thing in the world,” he said to the emptiness, “but even you can’t bear to say what that might be…”

At last he woke to find that he was free, that he could stand again, that he could walk. Why had he thought that he was a prisoner? He stood at the gates of the Mirdain, and it was Spring again. There was a trouble in his mind, the fading sense of something dreadful having happened and of some obligation of awful urgency neglected, but it was passing from him like the patterns of a dream. He seized upon it as it slipped away. _The voice from the fire, the words in the Ring, Sauron is here_ —

And, having seized it, he wanted nothing more than to push that knowledge away from him. It would be so easy, hardly even a choice at all, to remain there free and whole with his city shining around him and his colleagues beside him, back in the time before everything had gone so wrong, so wrong.

_Let it go. Rest. Take the offered mercy. There is nothing back that way but blood and terror and pain._

He turned from the open gates back into the heart of the Mirdain, back to the Great Workshop, ignoring the blurred, startled faces of master and student alike.

_I cannot cringe away from this. I cannot fail; if I refuse no one else will even try. If I do not win, my friend is worse than dead. I lost my father to the darkness; I will not lose my...._

The workshop looked empty, but it could not be empty. “Annatar!” he shouted. “Where are you? I am waiting for you, tyrant, monster, brother, friend, face me, face me and yield!”

The workshop waved and flickered as true memory overlapped with false vision. The ash-gray sky, the gritty rain, the fragments of a broken world cast up on the coast. _We have chosen these shores. We have chosen these shores._

The light of Annatar’s presence shining through his work-quarters. _Have you come back to this world the gods have abandoned?_

He called up the memory of the workshop again, built it up as he had seen it last. Blood on the table. Chains on the wall. Sauron and the Ring and the knife. He closed his hands on the arms of the chair, hard enough to hurt, as he cast his consciousness in search of the injured, suffering body that he knew to be his.   _I am dreaming. I will wake —_

He did wake then, in the workshop, tied to one of the chairs. Annatar’s face was inches from his, and for the first time he looked really taken aback, as if an established experiment had suddenly returned an unexpected and untoward result.

“What exactly did you think you were trying to accomplish there?” Celebrimbor demanded. His throat was raw and he was dreadfully thirsty, but the delirium was gone, the pressure on his mind released.

For an instant Sauron looked as if he wanted to ask him the same question, but perhaps through habit formed over four centuries of partnership, he launched into an explanation.  “I really don’t see how I can be clearer with you, Tyelperinquar, about what I am accomplishing. I am calling you back, I am loosening your hold on your destructive and selfish commitments, I am breaking your will.”

“A sound strategy. Sure to succeed,” Celebrimbor put in. “Torture will get you anything you want, so long as you don’t want anything but meat.”

Annatar ignored this. “Now, for a subject to respond to the experience of freedom and reprieve with the desire to return to…” he gestured toward the chair, the bloodstained cloth bands, “to a situation of constraint, is far more typical of a latter stage in the process. In your stage — where the subject is still talking, but not to the purpose — it’s usually more productive to show the prisoner their freedom, allow them to construct what that freedom might mean to them, and then make clear to them that freedom is in your hands not theirs.”

“ _Construct what freedom might mean_ …” Celebrimbor would not risk the effect of laughter on whatever it was that had been done to his ribs. “ _Think_ about this, Annatar. What did you expect I would do with freedom, but find you and face you and call you back? For the sake of all that we once shared, for all that there might have been, I will not see you lost to the darkness. Bound or free I will not let you go, until my death or your surrend —”

There was a sudden white flare like burning phosphorus and a short blunt movement that ended in the solar plexus and stopped his speech. But when Annatar spoke, he had smoothed out his anger to the very edge of his voice. “Do you still refuse to recognize that our goals are the same? That everything you claim to want, I offer you freely? There is nothing between us but your pride, your will —”

“And your knife. That is a knife? You moved awfully quickly there — all right, a knife then —” It tore downwards, crossing the path of the old scar.

“And now you’re just being dramatic.” Sauron was entirely calm again. “You were happy with me and you know that perfectly well.” The motion of his free hand took in the whole workshop. “There is no reason we can’t have it again. All of it. You at my side, Tyelpe, our work begun again, greater than either of us had dreamed —”

He had, he thought, perhaps another sentence left before the shock closed over him and the blackness took his thought. He bared his teeth in what was, under the circumstances, a passable approximation of a grin. “Your problem is that you’re so much less persuasive when your knife is, by the feel of it, somewhere in my intestines.”

Annatar was clearly about to tell him exactly where the knife was, but reconsidered, instead continuing in the same moderate tone. “I think you’ll find that very persuasive, eventually. They’re not complicated, the arguments you make directly to the body, but they do make it harder for you to pretend you’re anything other –“ something twisted – “than an incarnate. And there are much less unpleasant options available to you at any moment…” If he spoke further Celebrimbor could not hear him over the roaring in his ears.

 

There were no more visions after that. Annatar returned to the physical and the practical, quiet and tireless, never so much as leaving the workshop.  Celebrimbor matched him as best he could, calling on the strength of his line. His father had broken the courage of a city with nothing more than his voice, and the truth used as a weapon of war. His grandfather had swayed the hearts of an entire people. Could it be so much more difficult to break the will of one alone, though he was one of the gods?

Annatar’s argument was simple, repetitive, an idiot round of the same points: promise, threat, demand, pain. At one point Celebrimbor, immobilized in the chair, heard him rummaging in the drawers.

“Do you know what this is?” Annatar asked him, moving into his field of vision with something in his hand.

“I could not possibly be less interested in what that is, Annatar. I do mean that; it’s not bravado.” Celebrimbor sighed through his teeth, exhausted. “You’ve gotten boring. Have you noticed that? Oh, it’s a common workshop implement, but the _twist_ is that you’re going to use it to cause pain! It’s the same answer every time; you’re like a five-year-old asking riddles. There’s nothing interesting or creative or even intimidating about that.”

“No?” Sauron pulled up a workshop stool beside him and set the vial on the table with a clink, prodding with his fingertips at the soft skin at the underside of the wrist. “Actually, I do agree with you. Pain itself isn’t nearly as interesting as some thought. But it’s not meant to be interesting. There’s nothing that I’m going to do to you with this that I couldn’t do with something else.”

He unstoppered the bottle and laughed to himself to hear the catch in Celebrimbor’s breath.  “I am making a point, though, and I suspect you know that perfectly well. This serves me. All things serve me. As you will. You can let that drive you to despair, or you can let that spur you to greatness; it really makes no difference to me so long as you are mine in the end.”

He poured out a small pool of the muriatic acid into his palm; it had no more effect on him than the burning coals once had, and so he had no need to search for any particular instrument of application.

Celebrimbor was finding it harder and harder to concentrate. Stronger than the doubts and the visions was the simple exhaustion: the longing to let himself drop away into the broken geometries of pain, let himself evaporate like quicksilver in vacuum under the pressure of the terrible will always pulling at him.

“It does, though.” His voice had gone unsteady. “Make a difference. Even to you.”

A flare of attention, the flash of golden eyes. He tried to focus on the place where the pale hair was pushed behind one ear as the edges of his vision expanded and contracted.

“I know my ends; I focus on attaining them.” Annatar’s tone was cool and pleasant as always; he seemed to be talking simply for the soothing effect of his voice. “You’re agitated at this point, and I do understand that, but –“

“It makes a difference to you whether or not you drive me to despair.” His eyes were beginning to clear. “Think about it. What if you get everything you want? What if this works? What if, in pain and in the fear of pain, I yield to your will? Where you once had a friend, you will now have a cringing slave. Then, Annatar, and only then, will we both be lost beyond recall.”

He considered this carefully, which was a mistake. Celebrimbor’s argument was far stronger than he had anticipated. In the days of their collaboration this would have been a source of pleasure — he enjoyed few things more than watching that eager mind mapping some angle or corner of reality that he himself had never considered. But now — _what if this works?_ Everyone under torture was the same person in the end; there was nothing new to be learned about the ways the incarnates broke. And Celebrimbor as a hollowed-out shell, an echo speaking his own words back to him —

As he extrapolated the future from his words, it closed around him: the sudden, sickening, familiar sensation of defeat. The teeth at his throat, the ash-dark sky and the ruined fortress. Already he was running through the options: change shape, flee, surrender —

The Ring burned on his finger, steadying him, re-ordering a world temporarily misaligned. There would be no defeat. That thought was absurd; it should not be thinkable. He was done with defeat; he had made sure of that.

“There will be no defeat,” he said aloud. “I am become the first of the Powers in Middle-Earth; my vision will raise it to greatness.”

Celebrimbor was watching him sharply, far more alert than he had any right to be under the circumstances.

“You did notice that? What you just did there? You talk about vision, but you can’t even look at the world anymore, you can’t even let yourself _think._ ” He tried to lean towards him. “What you have done to yourself is already far worse than anything you could do to me.”

“I really don’t suggest you find out whether that’s true.” He laid one hand on the burns on his arm and heard him bite off a cry of pain.

“How much of the world do you think that Ring will leave you? How much of your own existence? You called it a _signifier of a bond_ , I tell you have chained yourself more straitly than the Valar ever could.” He paused, breathing hard. “I am the third Curufinwë, and I know something, Annatar, about bonds which cannot be broken. What they will do to you. The way the world gets smaller and smaller and darker and darker until you can’t even remember what it was like to create instead of destroy.”

Celebrimbor really did seem be getting stronger as he spoke; it was unaccountable. “If I did to myself what you have done to yourself, how would you react? If I came to you saying ‘Annatar, behold my greatest work, now I shall never create again but that seemed like a fine tradeoff to get myself a bit more power,’ can you look me in the eye and tell me —”

He was not going to make the mistake of listening to him a second time, so he hit him hard enough not to have to deal with the question. He was not fond of the sounds that the prisoner made when he could not speak, but they were merely unpleasant, not dangerous.

Celebrimbor was already trying to recover himself, to force those shapeless sounds into something like speech. He laid his hand, quite gently this time, on his throat, feeling the lines of the Ring’s power at work all throughout the body that he had broken and mended over and over and over. The small muscles of the larynx answered readily enough to command, stilling into silence.

No sooner had he done so than he felt Celebrimbor’s mind against his, simpler and more ragged than his thought in happier times, but perfectly intelligible.   _Look at me, Annatar; can you tell me that this is what you want?_

He could silence those thoughts as well, shatter the mind as easily as a bone and have a moment of peace. He recoiled at the possibility. It would be a waste, and more than a waste, never to hear that voice again, never to see those beautiful complex shapes in Celebrimbor’s imagination nor the gifted hands at work.

A little less swiftly than it once might have, perhaps, its responsiveness dulled by torment and exhaustion, the motion of Celebrimbor’s thought answered his, a firm step forward into the space left by him pulling back. _I love you. I forgive you. I will help you. You can stop this —_

He was fire-blind, lost in a white heat past anger. If he stayed longer at his side, he would kill him, or worse. Quite calmly he turned and left the room, and did not return for a long time.

Annatar was not, he reflected, entirely wrong. He had simplified the terms of the argument, worn it down to the most essential points, and he was losing, and none of it made any difference. Being pressed toward truth meant only that Annatar abandoned argument altogether.  

 _Where you once had a friend, you will have a cringing slave._ How much longer did he have before he broke? What was the first compromise he would make — or had he made it already? How long until Sauron rode out in triumph from Ost-in-Edhil, his new lieutenant by his side? This has been madness, to set his will against one of the Powers. Madness, to imagine there was anything left of his friend to be saved. He had told himself that he risked only himself in this desperate venture — madness, madness and pride. He was risking all of Middle-Earth, everyone who would suffer when his knowledge and his art were bent at last beneath the dominion of the One.

Sauron was not watching; the ones that came to him now from time to time were Men, disciplined by terror but out of the direct gaze of their lord’s eye. Surely it would not take so long to flee away into the darkness that seethed at the edges of his thought. Death did not come easily to the Eldar, but there was so much of death within him already. Once the despair took his spirit, even the Ring could not long hold the empty flesh together...  

And Annatar would be abandoned finally and wholly, and that spark that Celebrimbor had once seen in the ashes would be extinguished. Nothing left but an empty force of will, a whisper in the darkness, the Dark Tower rising over a withered land…

He did not want Annatar broken any more than Annatar wanted him broken, and he had the one great strength that Annatar did not: he could look at the world without the Ring-blindness; he could still imagine it otherwise.

He did not know how long it was before Annatar came back. At some point someone must have moved him; he was hanging by his wrists from one of the fixtures in the wall. His old friend looked worn, although Celebrimbor had nothing like the energy required to distinguish whether that was something in his appearance, or something in the jagged edges of his presence.

Annatar crossed to his side, not bothering to smile. “Tyelperinquar. Still?”

“Don’t you see? I have not given up, Annatar, I will not give you up. But you’ve given up already. The moment you brought out the knives was the moment you gave up.”

His hand closed around his throat, and his voice was quiet and terrible. “No, Tyelperinquar. When I give up, you will die.”

Celebrimbor laughed then, a dry choking that Sauron had to feel against his hand rather than hear. “My own death... it’s not far, is it, Annatar? You just admitted as much.” He could not tell if the pulse in the pressure against his neck was Annatar’s or his own. “How much more patience do you think you have, really? Is some corner of that, that nebula that you call your mind already making that argument to you? You clearly don’t need me whole or sound or free or happy.  Do you need me at all?” He let his head fall forward against his hand; the pressure increased for a moment, and then Annatar moved backward in response.

“You keep talking about how I’m going to kill you,” he said slowly. “I suspect you’re trying to provoke me into doing it. That’s an expected reaction from someone in your position, so I do understand why you would react that way, even if I find it hurtful. I prize you, I value you, and I will not lightly cast you aside, not for my own pride or for anything else.”

With sudden force, he skewered him through the chest with the awl he had left on the table. He ignored the ragged cry, instead listening for the pulse as it stuttered, raced, began to fade.

“This is what you want, isn’t it? This is what you’re hoping for?”

As the head began to tip backward, he pulled the awl back again, and sent the full might of the Ring’s power into the failing body. Flesh joined, veins knitted, the skin closed over. Convulsive tremors ran through the limbs, and Celebrimbor gasped for air.

“You still don’t understand what it is that I can do.” Annatar held him close, his laboring chest pressed against his own. “You will not die. I will not let you die.”

“I...” Celebrimbor’s voice was muffled against his robes. “I am not actually the one who wants me dead.” His head was resting on his shoulder, as heavy as if he were sleeping, and the slurring in his voice might almost have been taken for the exhaustion of a long day of intense concentration. “But eventually – you’re going to do that – and realize it’s not worth the trouble – to bring me back...”

“You’re confusing me with Morgoth again. I don’t get frustrated. I don’t get distracted.”

“No. This is based entirely on what I know of you. Of the person that I spent the last four centuries working beside. At some point you’re going to realize...” He had slumped forward; Annatar found himself supporting his entire weight. “This is a waste. It’s – a lot of energy and effort – just to restore someone to choking and screaming. If that’s what you want – there are easier ways...” He was dizzy, disoriented, his body trying to shut down while the lingering power of the Ring in his flesh still surged with energy. Annatar seemed perfectly content to hold him indefinitely, though, and after a while he spoke quietly, almost into his ear.

“Would serving me be so terrible? I will make you my lieutenant; my power will be at your command. Everything you wanted. Everything we wanted…”

Celebrimbor was silent for a very long time. Annatar did not press him for an answer, did not even move from where he held him.

“It’s strange,” Celebrimbor said at last. He did not raise his head from Annatar’s shoulder. “Everything I wanted… You came to me, Annatar, and the world was changed. Your art and mine, each pulling the other one forward, into the great dance. We lifted up our hands together, and I learned to want what I had never thought to dream. There was so much that I wanted. What was it you said to me? _I do not think you can be satisfied..._

“But now I want more. I want you. _You,_ the person that I loved, not the weapon that you’ve made of yourself. You, free and whole, no matter who you’ve been, no matter what you’ve done.”

His wrists were pinioned, otherwise he would have taken him in his arms.

“If your own power, even now, were sufficient for you, you wouldn’t be here with me. And there is no way out, except through my life or through your work. The Ring stands between you and all the choices you will ever make. Let it go, Annatar. Come back to me.”

His eyes were closed, but he did not need them to see the turmoil in the spirit beside him, arcing and flaring like fumes in a furnaces, the black shocks of impossibility. But it was not turned against him. At last Annatar spoke, low and unhappy.

“I – can’t.”

 

*

 

**Three Days before Midwinter, Morning**

 

“Face me, Sauron, face me, brother,” he cried. “Face me, or yield if you will not!”

Whether it was Sauron’s troops pressing the crowd back from around them, or whether it was the silent pressure of the overwhelming will that radiated from the slender white figure, the two of them stood at the center of an empty space. Celebrimbor was armed and armored, his sword in his hand, but Annatar, though he shone with a light that stung the eyes, bore neither weapon nor any trace of armor, only the same rich white robes that he had favored when he was an honored guest and not a conquering god.

The gates behind him — Narvi’s work, once the symbol of the city’s welcome — were ruined beyond repair. The last defenses had been breached: Sauron stood at the entrance to the Mirdain itself, and his soldiers — so many of them, Orcs and Men, were pouring into it. The Brotherhood was lost, the city was lost, all that remained was the final confrontation.

Annatar stood before him, unmoving, waiting for attack or for something else. _He means to face me unarmed._ Faintly, as if the distance were much greater than it was, Celebrimbor heard cries and clamor outside the gates, and the harsh bark of orders. The remaining troops of Ost-in-Edhil must be rallying to mount their last defense.  Still Annatar did not move.

It was the first time Celebrimbor had seen him since that night a hundred years ago, when he had turned and left him in the darkened workshop. How could so little have changed in him? Surely the Dark Lord should be wearing a form like Morgoth had worn once, huge and monstrous, a form to cow demons and send armies running. No, this was Annatar as he had known him, save for the new ring on his hand and the new emptiness in his eyes. He was still shining, still beautiful, and the terror that beauty carried with it was fully as great as if he had worn the shape of Morgoth himself, when the High King of the Noldor had braved him at his gates.

With measured steps, not raising his sword, Celebrimbor closed the distance between them. On the edge of his vision he saw Sauron’s guards surging forward, but Annatar stopped them with a quick gesture. They fell back again, keeping the space around the two of them clear, waiting for their leaders to decide the fate of the battle.

Annatar remained poised, as still as a serpent, making no motion toward attack or toward defense. When they were close enough that they could have reached out to take hands, Celebrimbor stopped. Looking into his face, he dropped his sword at Sauron’s feet.

A strange sound swelled in his ears, something between a roar and a groan from the onlookers. Annatar did not smile, but there was a shift in the impassive mask of his face, and a flicker in the depths of his fiery eyes.

“Annatar,” Celebrimbor said quietly. “Let them go.”

The golden eyes did not leave his face.

“My people. I will order them to stand down.  You have what you came for. Let them go free.”

Looking at him with wonder and suspicion, like a student puzzling out the meaning of a diagram, Annatar paced slowly around him, tracing out a narrow circle, coming around to face him again at last.  After a moment he nodded.

Something changed in the air, like the sudden relief of a storm breaking. The cries from the surrounding armies rose loud around him, but Annatar, without taking his eyes from his face or raising his voice, spoke a series of sharp orders that shifted his troops as one to a defensive stance and hushed the clamor again. The language burned in Celebrimbor’s ears; it was not one that he knew, but he was already repeating himself in the common Sindarin used in Eregion.

“The fighters of Ost-in-Edhil will lay down their arms,” he said, “and mine will escort them beyond the boundaries of the river. Give the order, Tyelperinquar, before your people break the peace I give you.”

Over Sauron’s shoulder, through the broken gate, he saw the black banner with the Star of Fëanor: Bruithwir, Maedhros’ old field commander, had brought up the remaining defenders from outside the walls. _Coming to my rescue_ , he thought, and pushed the bitterness of the thought away from him.

“Bruithwir!” he cried. There was a movement among the troops; the leader coming forward. Bruithwir in his black armor was a shadow in the corner of his vision. Celebrimbor did not take his eyes from Sauron, and he could not bear to examine if this was because he did not want to look directly at the man whose loyalty he had accepted and whose life had been pledged to his own, did not want to see Bruithwir’s face as he heard his orders.

“Commander. You will stand down. Your troops will lay down your arms. You will retreat beyond the river and you will not re-enter the city.”

“Curufinwë — my lord —” He had never heard such desperation in Bruithwir’s hardened voice.

“That is an order.”

“And you to retreat with us.”

“You gave me your fealty, commander,” he said through set teeth. “I order you. Go.”

The murmur of a crowd was a strange thing; as eloquent as the voice of the sea or the wind, and now it spoke of desperation, mutiny, refusal to let their lord be taken alive. Bruithwir lifted his sword, but did not lay it down. “When I rode against Sirion,” he began, “I thought that was surely the worst thing one of Finwë’s house would ask of me —”

“I will not tell you again.” Celebrimbor raised his voice, pulling into it all the remembered power of his father, his grandfather, his forebears the Kings of the Noldor. “ _Go, or be forsworn._ ”

The color drained from Bruithwir’s face. He dropped his sword. Two of his lieutenants — Celebrimbor had known their names once — came up beside him. A detachment of Sauron’s troops — all unarmed as their lord, he noted distantly, _what was that for?_ — came between them, cutting off his view.

But Annatar was staring at him, the beginnings of a radiant smile on his face. Without any warning at all, he pulled him into his arms.

It was no formal embrace, signalling the end of the hostilities that divided two hosts. Annatar clung to him fiercely, almost desperately, as if he never meant to let him go. Another deep inarticulate sound rose from the crowd: alarm, bafflement, anguish. _He has betrayed us. He has betrayed us all_.

Celebrimbor did not move and did not return the embrace. His face was set and very pale. But if Annatar was disappointed in his lack of response, he did not show it, eventually breaking away from him alight with pleasure.

“So you are prepared to be reasonable after all, Tyelperinquar! I was worried, you know, really worried, especially after you decided to fight a battle not even you could expect to win, just like the most insufferable habits of your people. Why didn’t you answer my letters? Why didn’t you do this months ago? You might have saved our colleagues, the whole city, not just whatever rag-tag survived the assault.”

“We all chose to stand against you, Sauron.” His lips were cold; the words came stiffly. “I do not — did not — command the Brotherhood. But if I — if I am the last one left, I cannot refuse to face you to the end. To try… Those whom I do command, I have sent away. This is not their quarrel. It is yours and mine alone.”

“Quarrel? There need be no quarrel, Lord of Eregion, Master of the Mirdain, Ring-maker, my own. Have I not just granted all that you ask? I am still the Lord of Gifts.” He laughed. “What, did you think I was some bloody-handed tyrant to kill for spite alone, did you think I was one of the Eldar, never to forget a grievance once suffered?”

He took both Celebrimbor’s hands in his. “But what does it matter? You’re here, you’re alive, you are _mine_ , and this is the beginning of our greatness.”

He must have caught the blank sick look on Celebrimbor’s face. “But you look awful, Tyelperinquar; you must be exhausted. Come inside and I will make you some tea; my commanders will handle the evacuation. This isn’t the first surrender my armies have managed.”

“Annatar…” He did not know what he was going to say. He had mapped this day out in his mind, sending his thought down the various branching paths of possibility. But now it came to it, to truth and blood, his friend before him and armies of orcs in the streets of the city he had built —

“And you will yield me what is mine,” Sauron went on, “and I will show you the way that it all fits together; the great order underlying all our work.”

“Yes. I wondered when we would get to that.”

Annatar looked at him sharply, his eyes going flat and opaque.

“We will discuss it further.” His fingers tightened around his hands. “Come with me.”

 

*

 

**Twenty-four days past Midwinter**

 

He stood in the workshop, as silent and still as one of its pillars, watching his friend dying.

He could stop it at any moment, of course — repair the body again, force yet another infusion of strength into the failing spirit. And for what? _You clearly don’t need me whole or sound or free or happy._ Any choice before him committed him to a path that he had already decided was unacceptable. The jaws had closed upon him, he could not get free.

“ _How are you winning?_ ” he asked the figure before him. He was beaten, broken, naked, he had no power at all.

Celebrimbor, shadowed in the late afternoon light, gave no sign that he had heard him. He was conscious, or something close to it, but deeply sunk into himself. The strong features, now sunken and gaunt, wore a look of intense interiority, as if he were learning strange lessons from his body in its extremity.

Annatar went to the taps along the wall again and refilled the water bowl. Using the edge of his thumb, he brushed the water along his lips.

“Tyelperinquar, my brother, it’s me. Open your eyes. Tyelperinquar, can you hear me?”

He could hear him; his eyes flickered open briefly and closed again. He drank, but said nothing. What was there to say?

“It still doesn’t have to be this way.” He had thought he had given up pleading forever. The last person to whom he had begged for mercy was the Herald of the Valar in the full glory of victory — a glory that he knew would quail now before the strength of the Ring. “Tyelperinquar. _Please._ Yield the Three. Let me stop.”

“The — Three?” The blank unrecognition was genuine; Celebrimbor was no longer even making the effort to close him out of his thought.

Celebrimbor was pulling his way back to full awareness, but Annatar, in increasing horror, was working through the full implications of what he had said.

“The Three, Tyelperinquar, your Rings, your great work… They are not here at all, are they.”

“No. I don’t think they are.” Celebrimbor still did not open his eyes. “That certainly sounds like something I would have done…” He sighed. “But I told you the truth, Annatar, I don’t know what I did with them; I cut that knowledge out of myself before you could. Did you think I was going to walk into the arms of Gorthaur the Cruel carrying in my head the only secret I have ever kept?

Sauron stared at him, appalled. “So you _expected_ me to —”

“I _hoped_ you wouldn’t. But you did spend the First Age as Morgoth’s master of torments. What reason did I have to believe that you wouldn’t revert to old habits once you had decided that power was the only thing worth pursuing?”

“But you made the Three to face me, Tyelperinquar, you made them to fight me, and you — you gave them up? You have been facing me with _nothing_ ? You —” The irrationality of it burned at him, the inexplicability of all the suffering. “ _Why_?”

This time Celebrimbor kept his eyes open. “Because you are mine. And I will hold on to what is most precious to me, and not suffer it to be lost. I swear to you, by the world that is, and by the more beautiful world to...”

“ _Now?_ ”

It hardly sounded like Annatar’s voice. Surely it wasn’t just the distortion in his senses that added the layers of strange and dissonant music to it, as if a hundred voices were speaking at once, and all in distress.

“Now, now when it is already too late, you who told me you spoke no oaths, _now_ you find something worth binding yourself to?”

Annatar pulled himself away from him and went to go stand by the window, as if he could find comfort in the patterns of the troops occupying the city, moving through the courtyard, spreading out through the countryside.

“One life,” he said to himself. “Against all this, what is one life, yours, or even mine…”

“Yes. I see the price at which you set yourself, Annatar, and I think it a poor one. I would not see a fine sculpture scavenged for scrap, I would not see a great book torn up for kindling, and I would not see your soul melted down and used as a glorified sledgehammer —”

“That’s not a very precise comparison. I would have expected better of you, though I suppose you might be excused under the circumstances. This Ring acts as all the Rings act: as a focusing device. You would do better to call it a _lens_ —”

“I remember what else you called a lens, once.” Celebrimbor closed his eyes and leaned back against the wall. “Was it in this very room? No. Higher, smaller, it must have been the Lesser Theoretical Workshop — I will lose all the rest of my past, Annatar, before I lose that night. How I laughed then, that _lens_ should be a word for love.”

Something happened in the presence by the window which he would have been hard put to describe in physical terms. The crumpling of a piece of paper, the oxidation of chromic acid, a demonstration of the incompleteness of an axiomatic system. He could not see Annatar; he did not know what he would have seen if he could have opened his eyes.

After a time — he could not have said how long — he became aware of a change in the room. Annatar was beside him, his burning presence gone quiet and dark. Instinctively he reached out toward him, but his hands were still pinioned; he only set some deep biting pain at work again in his chest.

When he had gathered himself enough to open his eyes again, he found that the light from the windows had faded to a dull orange-black, and the sunlight-stones in the overhead lamps were giving back the light that they had gathered throughout the day. They cast long shadows over Annatar beside him. He was twisting the Ring on his hand, and looking at him with a puzzled, abstracted expression, for all the world as if he were an apprentice run into a dead end on an examination, trying to figure where the error had been introduced, trying to remember what the point of all this had been.

“But was there anything there?” he said, half to himself. “Did we ever have anything, you and I?”

“ _Yes,_ ” Celebrimbor snapped, “ _of course we did,_ but you’re losing it now, aren’t you, you can’t even remember what it’s like to be happy — Annatar, if one of us has the right to be asking that question you’d think it would be the one who’s being tortured by the dearest friend he ever knew. Was it a lie from the beginning, was it all bound to end in this? But I know it was not, Annatar, I see the world where it was not a lie, and that is the world where I will live if I can and die if I must.

“But if you choose the Ring, you choose that other world, the world where it was a lie from the beginning, where you came to us as Sauron the Deceiver and through your cunning turned the craft of the Eldar to your own purposes, and cast us aside when you were done. I will die quietly — or not so quietly, just as you please — and you can take your slave armies and go in search of the Three. And once you have made a desolation of Eregion you can turn your sights West — on Numenor, on Valinor, why not? Bring all of Ea under your sway! Scour the world clean until you need look upon nothing outside of your will, hear no voice that does not echo your own thought, and tell yourself that this is happiness. No one will contradict you.

“Look at me, Annatar, not at _the prisoner_ , not at _your lieutenant_ , _look_ at me. Don’t even think about trying to pretend that you can’t or you won’t; when you named that Ring to yourself you saw me then.”

The person beside him raised his eyes, the gold faded to nearly ember-gray. He had seen Annatar in fire and glory, and Sauron in blood and ashes, and they were the same being.

“It cannot be done,” he said.

Celebrimbor could have wept with joy – indeed, he was weeping already. The concession had been made, it had now moved to a matter of how, and the impossible was a small matter compared to the unthinkable.

“You cannot let it go,” he said quietly, “but you can destroy it.”

He had been prepared for the killing anger at his words, for the last sudden pain and the final tearing free. He had been prepared as well for the black incomprehension that blotted out Annatar’s presence whenever he touched too closely on the matter of the Ring. But the motion of his friend’s mind beside him was so familiar he almost failed to recognize it: curiosity.   _I don’t know,_ Annatar had said to him once, looking at his work. _I’m still trying to understand it._ And beside the curiosity was something he had never seen from Annatar in his life — at any rate before these last few weeks: grief.

“Destroy it? You know me better than that, my brother; I thought I knew you better. To cast aside something so precious — to break my greatest creation —”

He had closed his hand around the ring, and closed his other hand around that, struggling to return to the theoretical side of the discussion.

“I had thought you had a clearer grasp of the principles involved in its creation. This is not mere gold to be melted down; this is my power, this is my self, poured forth into matter. It is more than a body, far more. I could burn through a thousand of these veils of flesh and never feel the loss, but this, but this... No, it must not be destroyed, it cannot be destroyed.”

“Annatar.” He kept his voice steady. “I do know what I’m asking you. I do know how precious that Ring is; I know what it is made of. But a creator can always unmake his works, even though the cost may be his life... My dear one. My dearest. I am so sorry.”

“You pity me, you _dare_ —”

“How could I not? Annatar, you cannot go back, you must go on, and there is darkness on every path before you. I have chosen what I will not yield; I have sworn it. And you must destroy the Ring, or destroy me.”

Annatar’s gaze passed over him, careful and evaluative, noting the bonds and the chains, the body broken and mended over and over again. Perhaps he was numbering the particles in his body.

“I think,” he said at last, almost conversationally, “you may be right.”

 

*

**One Hundred Years Ago**

 

Annatar stood by the wall in the Lesser Theoretical Workshop watching Celebrimbor at work. They had been working together for weeks now on the postulatory principles that would represent the next stage of refinement of their ring theory. They moved as one now, in hand and in thought, their partnership as effortless as two meshed gears. Sometimes they finished each other’s sentences, sometimes they shouted at each other, sometimes they sank into shared and silent abstraction while the tea cooled on the table and the autumn breezes through the windows ruffled the sheaves of notes on the table.

By the angle of the moonlight coming through the latticed ceiling – a glass dome like a smaller version of the one that arched over the Great Hall – it was well past midnight. The air was edging past chill and into cold, but Celebrimbor seemed perfectly unconscious of it. He had freshly plastered over an entire wall for the purposes of constructing diagrams, and the faint mineral smell of freshly calcifying lime hung, light and pleasant, in the air. There were lines etched into the drying surface, and lines sketched over those in multiple colors. There were notes interspersed through it all: equations and sketches and in one corner a scribbled line of something that might have been poetry: _poured out and poured out and yet ever replenished._

Now Celebrimbor was carefully setting faceted gems into the wall at certain points in the array. Annatar watched him closely, the motion of his hands among lines and light showing his thought more clearly than words ever could. He touched the surface of first one stone, then another, calling forth light from them, and then stepped back as a meshwork of light, mapping an intrinsic diffusion flow, sprang up across the wall.

Celebrimbor ran his hands back through his unbound hair, leaving streaks of plaster dust in the dark strands, and looked at his own work, as if he himself did not yet recognize what it meant. His long fingers were still charged with energy and tension, and one of his kind might have called the light in his eyes dangerous.

“Is this... right?”

“I don’t know,” Annatar said mildly. “I’m still trying to understand it.”

Earlier in their partnership anger might have bristled from Celebrimbor at that remark, as he believed himself mocked by a being for whom the inmost secrets of matter were no mystery. But they were long past that now. Instead he lit up with satisfaction, clear and luminous at the light he had been calling forth from his gems

“It is your work.” He looked over to Annatar, and smiled, sudden and brilliant. “Your work, passed through my hands... Do you wonder to see it return to you?”

He knew Annatar well enough now that he could map the movement of his thought as he retraced Celebrimbor’s theories. It was not that he understood him, precisely — whatever it was that Annatar called his mind was wider and stranger and more ancient than he could easily imagine, let alone describe. But even if it was like cooperating with a star system, they had grown familiar to each other. And there was nothing that brought him such pleasure as to see Annatar learning from his work, rare though those occasions were.

Annatar laughed softly, deciphering the final sequence of the diagram, and seized Celebrimbor’s hand. The gesture would have been impulsive, from anyone else, but everything Annatar did served some obscure order, some pattern that he could not see.

“That is greater than anything we have done yet.” Annatar’s fingers tightened around his hand. “But it is still – incomplete.” With his free hand he tapped at the board, his gesture catching at the lines of light and sending them dancing over his skin. “It – calls toward something higher yet...”

“Of course it does, Annatar.” Celebrimbor pulled his gaze away from the board and looked into his companion’s face. “To keep looking upward – that’s _your_ lesson, that is what you have taught me. And something designed using these differentials wouldn’t just act as a focus, it would draw on the power of... well, whatever it was built in response to, I suppose.”

“An anchor.” Annatar was tracing a portion of the array. “You could harness an entire mountain, using this. In the East, you know, there are mountains where the fires of the earth still live...”

“Why should we not look higher? Say wind, water, fire itself.”

Annatar’s laughter was louder this time, a sound of pure delight. “Why not?” He paused. “And yet the Rings we shall make with this design would still be reaching outside themselves; using a power source rather than containing it. What would it take, do you think, to create something as powerful as this that wasn’t dependent on an external source?”

Celebrimbor frowned. “I don’t see how you would do that, though, unless you forged all of Arda itself into a Ring.”

That familiar, deliberate half-smile. “Who would be fit to wield it, I wonder?”

Annatar slipped his fingers free but did not move away from him. He seemed brighter than usual, as if the veil he wore over his nature were wearing thin, the illimitable spirit shining through the flesh. His very presence pressed at Celebrimbor’s mind, a pressure like that of an insight on the verge of breakthrough, frustration and fulfillment at once. The weight and the tension set his hands in motion; he moved to the board again and began sketching.

Annatar paused, seeming to weigh whether or not to speak. But when he did break the silence his words were a blank, as neutral as his white robes that took on every change of the passing light. “What is it?”

“Lord of Gifts...” Celebrimbor let the words linger. “We have been – I have been –“ He swallowed. “Fortunate in you. Do you ever wonder what would have happened, if you had not come to us?”

Annatar’s presence burned beside him. “Then you should be less than you are now. And so, my brightness, should I.”

“You?”

A hand on his own again, stilling its motion. “I came to the Eldar to give you what you wanted. Wisdom. Power. Beauty. The desires of Elves are a little more ambitious than those of Men, but still finite. Those who can be satisfied are solved problems. But you...” The pause was shorter this time; he was no longer weighing his words. “I came to bestow great gifts. Do you know how remarkable it has been to find someone who can receive them? I do not think you can be satisfied. You have taken my gifts, and still you look upward; you call greatness forth from me.”

Celebrimbor turned to face him. “We are less now than we shall be in the time to come. I have been fortunate in you. Arda shall be fortunate in us.”

Annatar turned, lips parted as if to speak. But instead he took his face in both hands, and kissed him, lips fierce against his, hands tangled in his hair.

He had not planned on doing it. He had been content for centuries, should have been content for centuries more, to slowly nourish the understanding between them. He should have been content with his effect on Celebrimbor, with watching his strength and skill grow with desire burning in the back of his thought.

But in that moment it seemed he could do nothing else. Like a great wave descending upon him, as if all the force of his nature had drawn itself suddenly into a single point, he took hold of him and kissed him hard.

Long, long ago, before the world had taken on the shape it wore today, he had been endlessly delighted by chemical reactions, by watching new order ripple and blaze through elementary particles, leaving the substance utterly transformed. He felt the transformation of the knowledge running all through his friend’s being, like hydrogen saturation in the presence of a catalyst.

And then, to his astonishment, he felt Celebrimbor reaching back for him, first in thought and then in the flesh. It was more than reaction, it was response. His hands moved over him, eager and inquisitive, as if they meant to read, or possess, or both.

He had always believed the physical nature of the Incarnates to be a limitation, a regrettable weakness that he had made use of centuries. Now, suddenly, he saw the value in it. There was something unsettlingly intimate about being touched by someone who _was_ a body as well as a spirit, whose flesh was more than an instrument. It was Celebrimbor’s self in the strong skilled hands, no less than in the spirit that burned so brightly against his own.

This was the person he knew, the one took everything that he had given him, changed it and transformed it and asked for more. He wanted to keep touching him, to run his lips across the broad planes of shoulder and chest and the intricate folds at the corner of the eyes; he wanted to fill his mind until every unfolding shape spoke of him.

It was not how Celebrimbor had pictured the moment – and he had pictured it, had allowed himself, from time to time, to dream of how it might be if an emissary of the Holy Ones could be swayed by the same desires that moved the Incarnates. He had expected – no, imagined, he had never approached the audacity of expectation – something formal, courtly, something in Annatar’s elliptical style that raised ten questions for every one it answered, that changed the rules as it went along. A test, perhaps, a laborious revelation like their early Ring-work. _Why did you say nothing before_ , he had imagined himself asking, in the midst of the slow imagined delight. _If this was the truth, if we might have had all this, then why did you wait so long?_

There was nothing courtly or elliptical about this; it was ferocious and simple and almost overwhelming. In the tenth of an instant before his consciousness was swallowed up, Celebrimbor thought that he had been wrong. There was no question of before, no question of waiting. It could not have been otherwise. There were so many better things to pay attention to than the question of whether things should have been different.

It was a little bit like the moment when a long-studied problem is solved at last: recognition and discovery together. Staggering back until something stayed him, Celebrimbor pulled Annatar hard against him, his hands tracing out the lines of his body beneath the robes, cool and precise as stone under the cloth: the expanse of the back, the bright angles of the shoulders, the line of the spine, the slender waist and narrow hips. Annatar arched gratifyingly into his touch.

He grew transparent at the contact, as if he could see not only through the eyes, but through every pore of his body. The brightness of Annatar’s being shone around and through him, light passing through a lens.

In the midst of that spirit surging against his own, ancient and strange, full of fearful brilliance and incomprehensible shadow, the touch of his body was a piercing counterpoint. Annatar tasted like molten metal, if liquid fire were not death to drink. He tasted like rare minerals, the covert elements drawn out of baser matter only after long search, and like blood —

No, that was actual blood, someone had bitten his lip. He had no idea which of them it was; more research would clearly be necessary. Celebrimbor gasped for breath as Annatar drew back and the world returned; he was pressed against the wall with the stones from the array digging into his back, and Annatar was in his arms.

He had no words, but Annatar was murmuring against his mouth, against his ear, words he did not recognize but whose harmonies set him resonating like a glass.

Annatar’s own language was useless to him. There were no endearments in the Black Speech. There were words of praise: god, lord, ruler, conqueror. There were words of value – three of them. There was ‘valuable thing possessed by someone other than the speaker or someone to whom the speaker owes allegiance’; to use that word was as good as a threat. There was ‘valuable thing possessed by the speaker’. And there was ‘expensive’. None of them seemed quite appropriate to the person in his arms.

He reached farther back, to the language of his kind, whose words could not be spoken carelessly, and there he found the words that he was seeking. It was a pale translation of a few bars of an unutterable music, the song that had resounded through the Powers when they beheld their thoughts translated into substance, and descending into the limits of Arda had seemed not bondage but freedom.

“What is that?”

“That? That is Valarin, the language of my people.” He spoke another of those words like the motion of mountains. It sounded from his throat to his heart, it rang in his blood.

“ _Su-þâra_ - _phea._..?”  Celebrimbor tried to catch the syllables as they passed, sounding them out in imitation.

Annatar laughed at the attempt.“You don’t recognize it? I thought your grandfather might have taught you something of the speech of the Powers.”

He could not tell whether the laughter was his own or Celebrimbor’s, it echoed through both of their bodies together. “I am not talking about my grandfather, Annatar, not now; what are you saying to me?” As it were not perfectly obvious from what it was they were doing, who they were to each other.

“Exactly what I mean to.” He spoke again, savoring the syllables.

“Wait, I do think I know that one — is that _teacher? Master?_ ”

“Close. It shares a root; _to pass through_ , in the sense of the immaterial passing through the material, but the meaning is closer to what you would call _lens._ ” He nipped at the corner of his jaw. “ _Light-bearer, light-breaker, thou my lens; bear me, break me, let me pass through thee._ You know,” he added in Quenya, “it was not until we of the Ainur heard it from your lips that it came into our hearts that we too ought to have a language... _O thou by whom I am! Thou my world, my appointed dwelling, let me be for thee and in thee and of thee...”_

“ _A-þâr..._ am I wrong, or is that one of the roots in _Arda?”_  He _did_ understand; Annatar had felt that understanding sweep through him, and Celebrimbor now insisted on binding that understanding into words. Annatar could have kissed him again for the sheer pleasure of it, but it was almost as delightful to watch his mind at work.

“Or _dwelling._ Or _inbeing._ Or _that-for-the-sake-of-which._ ” Annatar pulled back, his hands still knotted in his hair. “I value precision of language, Tyelperinquar, and there is no word in any of your tongues to express what I wish to say. So we spoke when we saw our song made substance, when we descended from the Timeless Halls into the world which is, when we saw it and we loved it and chose to join our nature to it.”

Celebrimbor looked back at him, his bright grey eyes gone almost silver with desire. “I was _right,_ ” he whispered. “You were –“

The word _mine_ died on his lips. The silent music that had been carrying them failed and was lost.

“Annatar...”

Annatar looked back at him, his face inches from his own.

“Who are you?”

He knew this feeling, this sickening turn, the moment when satisfied certainty of triumph turned to doubt and the black abyss of defeat. What he wanted was within his grasp – what he wanted was clasped against his body – but between them –

Celebrimbor was pressing forward, prying, demanding, offering up the darkness in his own past, reaching for him. He saw no way out. Old habit pulled at him: change shape, surrender, run, only _escape_ rather than face the ruin of all that he had worked for.

Celebrimbor felt the instant change; saw the burning golden depths of his eyes turn opaque. But Annatar did not pull away.

“So you quarreled with Aulë – why deny it? My people quarreled with every single one of the Valar.” He pressed on. “Oh, my dearest. I know you are no emissary of the Lords of the West. Whatever it was that brought you to us in the beginning, you have seen what we shall be in the world to come. Show me who you are.”

“I came to you as the Lord of Gifts.” Annatar’s voice was neutral again, with no echo of that resonance that had set the fibers of his body reverberating. “And so I have been to you. Do you know what you ask, Tyelperinquar? Not all knowledge is safe.” He looked past him, but still did not pull away.

“You showed me how to bind power itself to matter, and now you are going to speak of _dangerous knowledge_ ? Look at this, Annatar.” He tipped his head back, indicating the interrupted array on the board.  “Look at what we are together. Look at me. You, _you_ will not glimpse what you want and shy away from it.”

Annatar raised his eyes.

Celebrimbor reached a hand to his face, felt the familiar shock in his fingertips, the painless burn at the touch of his skin. “Annatar. Trust me as I trust you.”

If he had not just been immersed in the fiery depths of Annatar’s self, the onslaught of untranslated images would have been overwhelming, even to one who was accustomed to sharing thought with one of the Maiar. Gasping, he felt himself clutching at Annatar for balance even as his mind attempted to parse the unfiltered memory.

A disagreement – a quarrel – a deep discord sounding through the music of his being.   _I will not serve anyone who cringes away from his own greatness._ Annatar – no, more than Annatar, the ageless spirit of whom Annatar was only a single facet – was tearing himself free of his master Aulë the Maker, the Power of Order and Shape. The emptiness burned through him, a being created to serve. Then _promise_ , then _terror_ , then Celebrimbor saw through Annatar’s eyes the mightiest of the Ainur and the cry of reverence that rang from him needed no translation.

“Melkor...” The sound of his voice recalled him to himself. He was still standing in the workshop. He was still holding Annatar in his arms. “Morgoth...” He drew a long shuddering breath. “So that was your _old master._ I... I see why you would not speak of this. But, Annatar...”

Annatar tightened his grip on his shoulders, cutting off his speech. Sharp and precise as a series of diagrams, new images sprang into his mind.

The light of the Silmarils in the Iron Crown. The meshwork of stones and spells in the structure of a tower. Celebrimbor choked on a cry as he recognized Tol Sirion, but the images were marching on, each landing like the blow of a hammer on cooling metal. The fall of the great dragon. The spears of the armies of the West. The face of Eonwe, the herald of the Valar, as Sauron threw down his weapons and knelt in the dust.

_I know when I am beaten. And I want to live._

He did not know when his hand had slipped from Annatar’s face – _Sauron’s_ face; or when his fingers had let go their hold on Sauron’s robes. But Sauron was still pressed against him, he could still feel the heartbeat in his chest and hear the soft sound of his breath.

“Was it for this,” Celebrimbor said quietly, almost to himself, “that I was cut free of my family’s fate?”

Annatar leaned closer against him. “Yes, yes, you see it, you do see it. This is why you and I lived, that we might –”

“No. That wasn’t really a question. I mean that it might actually have been better – for all of Arda, to say nothing of myself — that I should have died spitted on the spears of my kin at Doriath. Better that your creatures should have gutted me at the rout of Tol Sirion than that I should ever been called –” He attempted to recollect those reverberant syllables, was too sickened to go on. “That I should ever have been so named by _Sauron_.” He tried to wrench himself away, but he was already backed up against the wall; there was nowhere he could turn. Taking his shoulders, he shoved Annatar away from him as hard as he could.

Annatar went staggering back; Celebrimbor nearly lost his own balance from the shock of it. _He let me do that. I could never have moved him if he weren’t letting me —_

Annatar caught himself against the table edge, looking back at him through eyes gone black and lightless, as unreadable as a text written in a language he had never learned. After a moment he stood up, straightened his robes, and left the workshop without another word.

 

*

 

**Twenty-Four Days past Midwinter**

 

Almost absently, his eyes fixed on the Ring, Sauron made a slight gesture with his other hand. The bonds on Celebrimbor’s wrists gave way. He swayed on his feet and nearly fell, stifling a cry at the sudden release of the nearly dislocated joints, but, still not looking at him, Sauron put a hand on his shoulder to steady him. The power of the Ring pulsed out again, the pain in his shoulders faded, and for a moment they might have been standing as they had stood hundreds of times over the course of their long partnership: the two greatest craftsmen of the Age, together in the workshop at the end of the day, thinking over a complicated problem.

But Celebrimbor Fëanor’s heir was stripped and beaten and at the end of his strength, and Sauron Morgoth’s lieutenant was dreadful in might and in power, and on his hand shone the One Ring, the Ruling Ring, the sum of all their labors.

He drew it slowly from his finger.

Celebrimbor did not breathe. Annatar took his hand and pressed the Ring into it, where it lay, round and perfect and unnaturally heavy, on his palm. He did not know if Annatar meant it as a gift, as some final attempt to save his work, as a last desperate argument. _With power like this, what could you not accomplish?_ But his dreams for the world had narrowed to one focused and terrible point, and the Ring could not help him.

Its destruction would be beyond his art, that he could tell even from the most cursory examination. The forces that bound it together were only partially physical; indeed, like the one who had created it and poured his power into it, it was only tangentially a physical thing at all.

“It is beautiful,” he said, tracing it with one finger.

He lifted his eyes to Annatar’s. “How could it be otherwise?”

Softly he set the Ring back in Sauron’s right hand, closed the fingers over it, and enfolded his hand in his own.

“I can do nothing with this, Annatar. It has to be you.”

He reached a hand to Annatar’s face.

“Beloved. Trust me as I trust you.”

Annatar closed his eyes. The space around them went suddenly soundless. As if he dreamed while waking, Celebrimbor saw the world around them as a complex vector space, elements and the rules by which they were related, an order as strict and intricate and graceful as music. And there in the midst of it was a being older than world drawn into a ring, a tiny fragment of matter, smaller and more fragile than Celebrimbor was himself.

One quick breath, then he clenched his fist and the Ring crumbled in his hand.

The patterns vanished. The world went white, or perhaps black, a scalding uncolor that went straight to the mind with no need of the eyes. In a concussion of sound, and more than sound, the Mirdain rocked on its foundations. A cry of terror echoed around them, and Celebrimbor felt rather than saw far mountains quaking and distant towers falling as all that had been accomplished or begun by the power of the Ring began to shatter and snap and fade and pass away.

Annatar opened his eyes — he needed them now, as he never had before, if he wanted to see at all. The body, that thin veil, was all that was left of him, and it would not hold together for much longer; it was the last containment for the power in the Ring that had once been his, that had once been him. It hurt terribly; it had been hurled across the room by the force of the Ring’s destruction. He could not feel his right hand at all. And Celebrimbor —

He lay as he had fallen, not far from him, body twisted and broken. All of the works of the Ring were coming undone and the careful repairs that had seamlessly knotted up a dozen mortal wounds were unraveling. The dark blood was slowly spreading beneath him, but nothing dimmed the triumph on his face: pain swallowed up in victory.

Annatar met his eyes. He could not speak, but there was nothing that needed to be said. With a last effort, Celebrimbor was reaching toward him, and his hand found his own. Annatar felt a faint pressure of the fingers.

“I was... right,” Celebrimbor whispered, his voice wet and rasping over the blood pooling in the back of his throat. “You were...”

His lips moved, but there was no more sound; the blood was welling in his mouth, spilling over the edge of his lips.

Regret ran through Annatar, piercing, helpless, tinged with panic. So much had been lost, and now to see him lost too? _This is not what I — You will not die, you cannot die, I will not let you die —_

But Celebrimbor was unshaken. He remained steadfast, gazing into his face, until his hand fell open, and the light faded from his eyes, and he knew he could no longer see him.

He had faced destruction of his physical form before, and had thought little of it. But he had always had a self to sink back into, a self that was now dissipating around him in an exponentially increasing series of fission events. He could see nothing, imagine nothing, beyond the point of criticality, and pure terror washed around him, bearing him up like a black sea. _This must be what the mortals mean by death. So this is why they fear it._

 _Trust me,_ the other one had said to him, the one who had seen worlds that he could not imagine, the one whose world this was.

 _I will meet you again_ , he said, though he could not speak and his friend could not hear him. _In that world of yours..._

His body was losing coherence; it could not longer hope to contain the power that surged uncontrollably through it. He let go.

 

*

 

On the far side of the river, Gil-Galad’s troops under Elrond’s command had met with the light guerrilla forces led by Celeborn, and together they had been taking in the retreating remnant of the troops of Ost-in-Edhil.

Each story from the fallen city was more wild than the last: Morgoth’s old lieutenant had arisen again and no one could stand before him, Celebrimbor bought their safe passage with his own life; Celebrimbor had surrendered and sold the city to the Dark Lord, Celebrimbor had been conquered without Sauron having to lift a finger, the Master of the Mirdain had been in league with Sauron all along and whatever horror would arise and come forth from the city would be a thousand times more dreadful than the army of monsters that had swarmed into it.

Bruithwir, the surviving commander of the city’s forces, would not speak at all, save to issue orders. “My lord is lost,” was all that he would say of the fall of the city. When his duties did not call him to rounds in the camp he stood on a hilltop, statue-still, looking toward Ost-in-Edhil.

The days dragged by. The scouts patrolled the borders of the city, but there was no sortie from within it, no motion of the army at all. It made no sense to Elrond and his commanders. Ost-in-Edhil should have been serving as a base for Sauron’s army to conduct its forays deeper into Eregion, but something was occupying their commander’s attention and holding him at bay.

 _Your nephew?_ Celeborn had demanded of his wife, when her far-ranging thought touched his at evening.

 _Suffering_ , she replied shortly, a flicker in his mind. _A darkness is over all the city, and I can see nothing clearly, but he suffers and he is not alone._

There was nothing for it but waiting, then, waiting for the reinforcements from Gil-Galad, waiting for the promised ships from Numenor, waiting for the muster of Khazad-dum, waiting for the struggle within the darkened city to end.

The end came quite unexpectedly one evening just after dark. Suddenly, silently, it was full noon, and they had just enough time to glance around at each other, to see their fellows’ faces stark in the appalling light. Then the darkness dropped again, and with it came the sound, a sharp crack and a long tearing roar. It shook the sky, it thundered through the ground; some cast themselves to the earth and even those who had been seasoned in the cataclysms of the War of Wrath trembled, and thought of dragons and the strife of the gods.

The horizon glowed dull red as in the distance rose a vast pillar of flame-mottled smoke, and there was no mistaking it now: it was coming from Ost-in-Edhil. A great cry went up, of fear as much as of triumph, and Elrond hurried to take counsel with Celeborn. But Bruithwir stood on the hilltop, weeping freely with joy.

“My lord,” he said to the distant swelling cloud. “My lord....”

They rode out that night and found the city was levelled, the waters of the two rivers were pouring in, and the House of the Mirdain was simply gone, a scorched crater where it used to be. The darkness that had obscured the area to the Sight was gone as well, and with it, all trace of that blank and overwhelming will. Those portions of the army that had escaped the destruction were leaderless and shaken; the Orcs already fleeing for the mountains and the Men organizing themselves into defensive camps.

 _What can you tell me of this? We are all in doubt and confusion, Orc and Man and Elf alike._ Celeborn asked when Galadriel’s thought touched his. _What has become of Sauron?_

There was a long silence from his wife while she sent her far-reaching sight through regions that he had no name for. _Gone,_ she said at last. _Gone, and the world is changed._

 _And your nephew?_ he asked again.

_He has won._

 


	2. Two

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Celebrimbor and Sauron re-establish their acquaintance.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the first time I've ventured into into really completely unknown, straight-off-the-map, where-we're-going-we-don't-need-roads AU territory. And it never would have gotten started, let alone finished, without Sumeria's help, for which I owe her thanks.

“Yes,” said Tulkas impatiently, “but what are we going to _do_ [to/with/for/about/because of] him?”

In deference to the sensibilities of the Eldar, the Máhanaxar was a place as well as a state. Outside the shining gates of Valmar, at the base of the high green hill from which the Trees had once shone, stood a vast round court encircled by fifteen thrones. Or rather fourteen; one was now merely a heap of broken stone.

And out of respect for the figure who stood in the center of the Ring of Doom, small, silent, wrapped in gray, the Powers of Arda were conducting their councils in physical form and bound by the limitations of words. Those limitations were not quite the same as they would be among the Eldar or any of the other speaking peoples – Tulkas had uttered a half dozen adpositions at once, and everyone there understood what he meant by them.

“Can he even change shape anymore?” Vána wore the form of a young woman, but the motion of her head as she cocked it on one side was far more akin to that of a bird. Receiving no answer from her fellows, she hopped down off the throne and approached him.  She poked at him with one finger, a quick darting motion like a bird snapping up a shiny object to see if it was a snail, or merely a stone.

“Can you?” she repeated.

The figure raised his head. “I will wear no other shape,” he said quietly.

Despite their commitment to spoken language, the reactions that rippled from the Powers gathered in council were not words. Some were not sound at all. Oromë, crouched on his throne with the ponderous nonchalance of a saber-toothed tiger, yawned suddenly, exposing long sharp teeth. The vines of Yavanna’s hair rustled, and all the white-and-silver moths that made up Irmo’s cloak beat their wings once, then settled to rest again.

Aulë rose, not looking at him, but addressing his speech toward Manwë. “Does this one [1] remember no other shape? Have all others been forbidden? Or has he lost them? That was the Marrer’s own fate, was it not, until he who cracked continents and chained lightnings could be stung on the foot by a son of Finwë and never recover his strength?”

It was not Manwë but Estë who answered, not moving from her seat. “Not so,” said the Power of Healing. “It is choice and not consequence that confines him.”

“But why would anyone make such a choice?” Aulë insisted. “If this one has - ” His hair erupted in showers of sparks; the ground trembled and groaned. From his throne, Manwë turned his eyes upon him, and, abashed, he called his power back into his vesture. “If this one has _returned_ ,” he went on, his voice thrumming with counterfactuality, “then why does he not rejoice in his freedom?”

“Freedom,” said masked Irmo in a dozen soft voices, all of which seemed to sound from somewhere behind each listener’s shoulder, “is exactly what’s under discussion.”

One of Yavanna’s tendrils curled around Aulë’s wrist. “You don’t see it, husband? Look at his eyes.”

“In homage or in penitence,” said the Elder King, “this shape is his choice, and as choice we respect it.” Gently, he drew them back toward the matter at hand.

Guiding the councils of the Valar was difficult – their natures were so vast and their estates so divergent. If it had not been for the reverence they held for authority, the task would have been impossible. But Manwë wielded his sovereignty among his brethren lightly, and guided their debates as the wind shepherded the clouds across the sky. It was not a quick process; already many days had flickered past them, and still the Powers of Arda had not even determined the nature of their council.

Tulkas was still unsatisfied. “But why are we here? Is this an inquiry, or a trial, or a festival or debate or what? Are we his judges? Are we to punish him?” He looked toward Mandos.

The Judge did not raise his bowed head. “By whom does he stand accused?”

There was another rippling outwards from the gathered Powers, as if a stone had been cast into the calm waters of reality. Many voices among the Valar spoke together, the words reverberating across a dozen different registers. There was water in those words, and fire, past and future, the quiet depths of the forest and the tumult of thunder in the clouds.

Manwë rose, and addressed himself to the figure at the center of the ring. He did not touch him, but a wind stirred in the Máhanaxar, pushing the gray hood back from his head and letting the sunlight shine in the unbound silver-gold hair.

“Returned one,” he said, “what do you have to say in your defense?”

Showing neither haste nor fear, he cast his gaze in turn on every face in that dreadful circle. He used only his eyes to look at them, apparently adopting the baffling limitations of the body he wore. When he came back to the Elder King, he spoke. “Nothing.”

“Who then shall speak for you?”

Again a polyphony of voices rose in answer, the distinction between speech and song growing less by the minute. “When Osse returned to us, the Lord of Waters stood surety for him --”

“Osse had not fallen so far, nor returned from so great a distance --”

“Whose is this one?”

“Aulë, he is one of yours --”

The Smith rose, his voice a deep basso vibration of anger and pain. “No. No longer.”

The other voices in the ring were stilled, and the words sank into the silence like an iron spike sinking into stone, or wood, or living flesh. “My servant, this one who was so precious to me, gave himself to the Lord of Fetters. This one – _you –”_

Valarin had a shimmering panoply of pronouns. Though a comparatively late development in the language of the Powers, the enchanting expressive possibilities of the words for self and other had eventually given rise to an endlessly nuanced spectrum. Aulë, a craftsman of language as well as of matter, had his part in originating many of them. _You,_ the Smith had said, in a sentence using the seigneurial voice that should have called for the second person of fealty accepted: _you-my-servant._ Instead he used the second person of focus accorded, which might be _you-my-equal_ or _you-my-enemy._

“Knowledge and skill, my gift which I delighted to give and my craft which I delighted to teach, are become a blasphemy because of you. You have taken the study of this beautiful world and used it to break Arda from within, you have taken invention and used it to pursue empty power, you have taken creation and used it to destroy. You have polluted my gifts and tainted my craft. Elder King, broken earth and plundered stone speak against him, machines turned weaponry speak against him, I speak against him. He is mine no more.”

He ended on a rumbling cadence, shedding stone tears, but as he sank to silence, Vána spoke, high and sweet as birdsong. “But he is one of mine, in part. The green shoots trampled and the young creatures blighted speak against him; the longing of the heart toward life which he used as engine of torment speaks against him. But within the mud the seed cracks open, in the mess of spring the blind young open their eyes. All life renewed is mine, all flowering and new growth. He is here returned before us; the Spring speaks for him.”

Nessa joined her voice to Vána’s before she had done speaking. “The Great Dance speaks for him, for the beauty arising from harmony, for order made grace. And the Great Dance speaks against him for harmony destroyed, for the grace of order turned to the booted tramp of marching armies across the sweet clean ground.”

Oromë rose, belling like a pack of hounds in full cry. “He has wronged the wild creatures and desolate lands and the empty places. He has tainted Fear and rendered Dread unholy. He has twisted the bodies and spirits of those who kill in innocence. Yet he has broken his own fetters at least to stand before us, and Freedom speaks for him, who else had wronged it past repair.”

The Earthqueen took up his theme. “Tree-killer and servant to the Tree-Killer! Dimmer of light and silencer of song! Little have you ever known of my dominion, trampling what you would not understand, destroying what you could not control. You who named yourself the Lord of Gifts, you would speak with my voice, the voice of the Giver, saying _prosper_ and _flourish_ and _heal_ and _grow_ , while believing this could be wrought through force. Gift-lord, you scorned the gifts that were offered you, taking slaves where you might have had willing servants.”

The force of her attention upon the figure at the center of the thrones was already bending the world in the direction of her nature; the grass around his bare feet lengthened and sharpened into tall green blades. Yavanna left her words there, upheld around the gathered Powers, until her younger sister spoke.

“Then you will not speak for him?”

“I did not say that.” Tearing her hair free from her throne like ivy from a wall, Yavanna rose.  “The Dead are none of mine, but Death is mine: the change wrought not through judgement nor through choice, but through the ending of the old to make place for the new. He has passed through Death. Life speaks for him.” She sat down again, her theme resolved.

“History speaks against him,” Vaire said, “We have gathered so for one greater than he, and his return among us proved no return at all. But Story speaks for him, and the melody of Story is strong, pulling from the past and pressing toward the future.”

Gray-clad Estë had drawn herself up onto her seat, where she sat hugging her knees. “Too much has the Cruel One labored in my domain! I would not willingly speak for him, not while the spirits that he has injured sleep in my gardens, seeking the healing that perhaps they will never be strong enough to receive.  But my will does not enter into it. I am Healing for him as well as for his victims; I cannot be less than what I am. As long as he seeks to be made whole, Healing speaks for him.”

Light glinted along the lines of the blank, beatific mask worn by her husband Irmo, the lord of dreams, and he said only “What might have been speaks against him. What might yet be speaks for him.”

The attention of the Powers shifted toward his elder brother, but Námo said nothing. Nienna, his sister, raised her quiet voice instead. She was the oldest and the mightiest of the Fëanturi, and she did not pull her hood back from where it shadowed her face.

“In the first Great Music that was made and was lost, there was no hint of what we learned to call _torment_. When we were translated into Arda, no one knew but I that the body might be turned into a weapon against the spirit. I weep because of the Lord of Wolves and the Master of Torments. I weep for his works. I weep for him as well.”

“ _For him?”_ The counterpoint was earth and sea at once, hard accusation and gentle question.

“I mourn for all that Melkor has broken, among Elves and Men, and among the Beautiful Ones. This one was corrupted by Melkor. How great the beauty that was lost in that undoing!”

“Do you plead for him, Sorrower?” whispered her youngest brother’s placeless voice.

The silence swelled.

“There is no mercy we can show him greater than the mercy by which he stands before us now.”

Ulmo rose at this, and in his song there were no words at all, only the voice of the waters: the pull of the tides and the power of the great deep, the waves swallowing desperate sailors and covering broken land and grinding stone upon the shore until it was pulverised and scattered and clean.

The one who stood at the center of the circle grew pale, but made no other response. A wind rose about the Máhanaxar; the Elder King querying the Powers if they had all spoken as they saw fit. Mandos upon his left hand and Varda on his right remained silent, reserving their speech. The wind returned to Manwë, as if it were the breath that he drew to speak -

“Well I think we’re all missing a very obvious point,” said Tulkas, who was not normally apt to express himself in eloquent words. “We can’t – but he – _Melkor!_ Right?” He raged in the air, both hands upraised in fury. “But on the other hand – _True Love!_ What that Noldo boy did? And he came back for him – it’s just – it’s all so…. Right? _”_ He sat back down, dabbing at his eyes with one great fist.  

Manwë smiled slightly, and the breeze grew light and gentle. “You have spoken for the world he wronged. His deeds are heavy, and who shall tell the measure of them save he who comes no more among us? Yet those deeds were undertaken at Melkor’s hest; Melkor’s was the will though Sauron’s the hand. He served, though rebel; traitor to all else, this he did not betray.”

“Name also to his account his deeds once free of the Lord of Fetters,” said Nienna, “that he desired pardon and sought the well-being of the world he had helped to ruin.”

“Aye, name them,” said Vaire, “that with his will restored to him, he straightaway fell back into his old path.”

“Not straightaway,” said Nienna.

Manwë spoke. “Aulëndil once you named yourself, for a fealty you forswore and a faith you broke. You left your rightful master to serve the world’s foe and ours, but those days are ended. Returned, to whom now do you answer? Whose authority are you under?”

The object of his address replied, dry and quiet. “Do you ask that, Sulimo? Do you not recognize the rights of conquest?”

“Conquest accords no rights, Lost One.”

A sound that was almost laughter. “Truly, Second of the Powers, nothing is hidden from your eye. No, it is not by the rights of conquest that I yield myself to the one whom I have chosen. It is much simpler. I love him; I chose him; I would not exist without him.”

The murmuring among the Powers increased in intensity, though not in volume. The air shook, the earth hummed.

“He claims to answer to _him?_ ”

“It is a trick, a stratagem, like Melkor’s of old –”

“No, husband, I do not think it is. Do you not see how he bears himself?”

“Certainly the jewelsmith has demonstrated he knows how to manage him-”

“Send him to Fëanor’s heir; let him do with him as he will!”

“He – well, his spirit – is in your halls, Námo-”

The Judge spoke, and the rest were hushed. “He is. And I will suffer no one to trouble his peace there. My Dead are in my charge. when they are ready for a future, let them depart from me into the world!”

Vaire looked rueful. “We have learned, and bitterly, the cost of importuning the Dead.”

“The Weaver is right,” said Manwë. “It is a new thing that he would ask of Curufinwë Tyelperinquar; let him ask it in the world, where choices may made.”

“I cannot countenance this,” said Estë. “He killed the one he now claims as his lord; he tormented him before he died. The Eldar come forth from your halls, Námo, when they and the world are ready that they should live. This is not healing, or not the whole of healing. Fëanor’s heir may not be at his full strength. He may not wish to face this one again. We should take thought for his protection.”

The one in the center of the circle, who had been listening to the debate in silence, suddenly raised his head. “Now you are concerned with protecting him from me?” he cried.  “ _Now?_ ”

He looked from one to the other of the assembled Powers. Something had sparked to fire in his darkened silver eyes. “Alone, armed with no more than words, he faced a god who would destroy him; where were his protectors then?”

Aulë spoke. “The Exiles chose to put themselves beyond our protection. Would proud Fëanor’s heir have accepted the help of Valinor once offered?”

“He would.” The voice dropped almost to a whisper.  “He did.”

Manwë once again hushed the mounting clamor among the others as the voice from the center rose in strength.

“You make very free, Lords of the West, with your accusations on behalf of a world that you abandoned. For all the wrongs done your dominions, where were you to defend them? I may have – I was not – but I _acted_ , from the first, I acted for this world that I love, yes, I even as you –”

Out of regard for Yavanna’s feelings, Vaire had not worn the form of a spider since the murder of the Trees. Still, her long skillful fingers seemed to have too many joints to them, and to trail thread at times. She raised them now.

“I know the names of all your dead, Sauron, elves and men and beasts, trees and waters, cities and lands. Shall I read them over to you?”

“Proceed, Weaver! The Lords of the West may love the world enough to sit in judgement of those who damage it, but not enough to defend it from that damage-”

“Do you speak of damage, Cruel One, Abhorred One, Shadow, Necromancer, Lord of Wolves?” If it were not History herself who spoke, the words would have been mockery, uttered in another voice, familiar and beloved. “ _If only someone could have stopped it._ ”

“Someone – did.”

Vaire looked at him where he stood amongst them, head bowed again.

“I killed him,” he said, as if he were learning what it meant, as if hereafter he would have a word for horror. “I killed him. I killed him.”

All at once Vaire laughed, the short bitter laughter of History, the silent echo of image against image. “You speak the truth, who were named Deceiver; more truth than perhaps you intended.” She turned to the wider circle, lines shimmering between her hands. “It was not only through the actions of Curufinwë Tyelperinquar that this one was removed from the world. Sauron did more to stop Sauron than did any of us.”

The silence that followed her words would have seemed long even to the Eldar. Light and dark shifted around them as the Powers considered her words and the consequences of their truth. When Laurelin’s scion rose flaming in the East, and the pale golden light touched the grass of the Máhanaxar, Námo rose from his throne at last.

Mandos wore the shape he used among the living, deep-hooded and blindfolded, for there were few who could endure his glance and keep their minds unsplintered, few who could meet the eyes of Fate with eyes of flesh. He did not turn his head, but the weight of his attention could not be mistaken for anything else.

He spoke for that which Must Be, for all that followed from what had gone before, and his words were generally the end of any debate among the Valar. But though his words were heavy, they did not fall with the force of ending.

“No Doom we would pronounce upon him,” said the Judge, “would be as severe as that which he willingly took upon himself.”

The response from the Powers rose slowly this time.

“Even Melkor we contained merely; we did not unmake him.”

“To sever his connection with the World…”

“How is it that he is here at all, after that?”

“Yes,” said Manwë. “That is our last consideration, and one which we cannot neglect. If he is here at all, it is because he was sent back.”

“Sent back!”

“Yes, sent back from beyond the world.” Manwë leaned back against his throne and sighed deeply. Clouds scudded over the morning sky. “He was gone, and now he is here; that is beyond the mightiest of us. Evidently Eru Iluvatar believed there was still a meaning to him.”

There was a strange pervious silence as the assembled company absorbed that thought in its strangeness. Tulkas broke it, as he broke many things.

“What is his name now, anyway? Does he have one?”

The figure at the center made no reply, only looking back at Tulkas coolly and without alarm. Aulë spoke from behind him. “It was I who gave him a name that could be uttered in speech. I named him as beautiful among the Beautiful Ones, admirable and excellent, and it was that name he took with him to the Iron Hells and made it and himself abhorred to all the world.”  

The being that had been Mairon and had been Sauron turned toward him with distance in his look, still as though he needed the eyes of the body he wore to see him. “To whom is he precious now?” said Aulë quietly, and sank to silence.

“It seems to me that this is another judgement we may defer to his chosen lord,” said Yavanna. Estë stirred in counter-point, but did not speak.

“This is… troubling,” said Vána. “We cannot step outside the will of the Everspoken Name. But what would He have us do with this one? Is he –”

Her voice faded into a discord of birdsong, in which were audible “our punishment”, “our responsibility”, “our brother”, “our patient,” and “our problem.”

“Elder King,” broke in Oromë, “your thought is closest to the mind of the One. Can you not ask Him to send us some word?”

The clouds in the morning sky thinned, broke up, vanished into trailing mists of vapor. “He has spoken already,” said Manwë. “His word stands before us.”

Oromë let out a great cry, like the scream of a mountain lion. “This, _this_ is the first word that Eru should speak to us since the creation of the world? _Sauron?”_

Ulmo spoke at last. “Not the first. This is the word that he has been speaking to us since first we lifted up our eyes and saw the skies fill with snow and the lakes touched with frost.”

Sauron looked sharply at him. For the first time, something like fear crossed the proud face.

“The first word was creation,” said the Lord of Waters. “The second...”

Even now, even wearing bodily form, the Valar coming to a decision in concert made the world shake. Something passed through the air and the earth; in Tirion some shuddered and some laughed suddenly, and in the streets of Valmar voices were raised in brief wordless song.

“He shall go then,” said Manwë. “Go, Nameless, and await the judgement you have chosen.”

He went forth from the gathering, and Manwë’s thoughts circled above him in the form of birds of prey as he took his way on foot toward the West. But the Valar did not leave their assembly; their circle was open but not yet dissolved.

“Look,” said Aulë watching him through Manwë’s sight. “He cannot conjure up even the form of repentance before us. He is proud still. I do not trust him, we must not trust him.”

“You know, O Elder King,” said Nienna, “and we know as well, the truth of the heart cannot be drawn forth by force. Any choice we make is a choice to trust, or not.”

“In truth, I would trust his repentance less if it showed itself more,” said Yavanna, mostly to herself.

“I loosed him upon the world once before,” said Aulë. “I loosed him upon the world once before…” The pain still ran through him, a fissured crack through which the fire shone.

Varda spoke. “It is true he is none of yours, Aulë; his choices shaped him. He is of your kind; he always will be. But he is now as he has chosen to be: a Maia of Melkor.”

It was rare for the Lady of the Stars to take on physical form at all; the containment of the vastness of her being into something as comprehensible as body was a fearful undertaking.

“Not Morgoth. Melkor.”

The attention of the Valar was all bent upon their Queen, inclining into her like light into a gravity well. She spoke on.

“Because of him your domain was darkened, Aulë, because of him invention is become a plague as well as a blessing in the world. And because of Melkor, the Children have never known change without loss. Yet invention remains a good and not an evil.” Stars glittered in her midnight voice. “Even so transformation, that was our brother’s own nature before he failed himself, remains holy.”

Manwë spoke as if he spoke to her alone; not a king to his councillors but a husband to his dear spouse. “I did not think anything of Melkor remained in the world,” he said. “I thought it was all Morgoth.”

“Nothing of Melkor that remained? What of the ice, beloved, and the clouds? What of the Children, whose music was uttered by the One himself in answer to the proud discord that Melkor propounded? Melkor’s part is playing out within the world; aye, by Melkor’s work shall Morgoth’s be undone.”

At once she let her outward form fall away and vanished into the larger world, fading like stars behind the morning sky. But Manwë smiled and spoke to her softly, in that private form of address that the Powers may only ever use for one person of all the world[2]. “I see why he feared thee.”

Yavanna stood at her husband’s side, looking out after the tiny, vanishing figure. “Can we hope indeed for transformation? His wrongs are vast as the world, and he does not know them yet.”

“No,” Vaire agreed. “The only wrong he truly understands is that which he did to the third Curufinwë.”

“Yet he does understand it,” said Nienna.

“Seeds may grow,” said Yavanna, who was already rooting herself back into the earth.

“And he may wait long,” said Estë, “ere Fëanor’s heir will suffer his presence; ere he will return to the world at all.”

 

***

 

Námo’s realm was called, by the living, the Halls of Mandos. Even this name was an image to soften the harsh edges of unadorned reality; the land of the Dead is the land of that which is. To say that Celebrimbor slept in the Halls of Mandos would be a metaphor, imposing an image over imageless fact. And Celebrimbor himself had no power for image or anything else. He existed, and no more, without form and without awareness. He was, and he was dead.

His father waited, crouched beside him, pride and anger forgotten. There had been very little left of Curufin Fëanor’s son other than spite and anger and the pride which cannot be distinguished from shame, and even the long centuries since his death had restored little of his reality. But now, though his spirit was a wan shadow, he strove toward existence, pulling himself back to the days when there had been more to him, when he had been called _father_ and had answered.

His son did not stir and did not speak.

“He is hurt?” Curufin asked at last. He was alone, or seemed to be, but every silent cry and every question asked in those halls was answered, if the heart could bear to hear it.

It was Námo’s cold thought and not his sister’s gentle one which answered him. “He is spent. Do not trouble him. Let him rest.”

“He should not be alone, Mandos, not alone.” The memory of tears was a very distant one, but no less clear in that place of black clarity.  “The Dead sang in these halls when Sauron was thrown down. My son is worthy to be named among the heroes of the Noldor. I will not leave him.”

The cold voice was quieter now, harder to distinguish from his own thought. “It is possible he will not know you even when he knows himself again. If he does not wish to see you, he will not see you. You died childless, Atarinke, and he fatherless. You told him you had no son.”

“I do not ask – I do not desire – that he should forgive me,” he said. “But if I might tell him, if he at least might hear, that I am sorry. That is all I want.”

“Not forgiveness?” It was hardly a whisper now.

“That is all I want,” he said again, and returned to his solitary vigil, to the silence and the darkness.

Memory returned to him, of a time beyond the quarrel that had sundered the bonds of family, a time on the very edge of fatherhood. This was as his son had been before his birth, when Curufin had first sensed his spirit, distant and strange and sleeping, but could not tell whether and to what degree his son in turn knew him. He called to him softly, as he had called him long ago, speaking of a beauty that he had himself forgotten: _the world that waits for you, the light that waits for your eyes to see it, these arms that wait to hold you._

 

Neither will nor desire can hasten healing in the spirits of the Dead, but Mandos had spoken only plain fact: Celebrimbor was less injured than he was utterly spent, like a champion at the games after a victory on the field, having given the utmost in body and spirit in his struggle. It was not so very long a time before the memory of form returned to him, flickering backward from his outstretched, empty hand. It was pale and uneven, marked in places with the dim memory of terrible wounds.

“...Annatar?”

It seemed to Curufin that he heard his son’s voice, faint but not weak, as if from somewhere very far away.  

“Hush, Tyelpe, it’s over; there’s no more pain. Tyelperinquar…”

The remembered form shifted, blurring around the edges.

“Can you hear me?”

He seemed aware of his presence, but Curufin could not tell if he heard him. “I can’t see. My… Am I hurt?”

“Oh, my son. You were killed.”

“I can’t see.”

“There is no light here but the light of memory.” A confused, faltering movement from his son, a few stuttering images from the past. Fire. Something white and searing. “Tyelperinquar…”

Curufin called it back for him: the stars burning over Beleriand, the glowing lamps they had built together in Nargothrond, the rich full light of the lost Trees in an Aman that would never be again. In that light of their shared past, Celebrimbor opened his eyes and saw him.

“Father. _Father –”_

Something ignited. A simple and furious love blazed from him; the truth of the spirit brighter than the memory of light. Curufin shrank back from it, but Celebrimbor was almost laughing. “There was mercy for us after all! Father, my father, I have wanted to be with you for so long, to unsay what I said to you in Nargothrond –”

“My Curufinwë. Not to me. I am sorry. I am sorry –” and with a flicker he passed beyond speech, to those wordless realms shared by the Dead where one heart may see, if it chooses, the truth of another.

His son’s spirit leaped and flared around him, like a fire of tears or of laughter. “Do you think I would forgive _Sauron_ and not you?”

 

Death was a slow, strange, inexorable understanding, a process of growing into the fact of loss. Námo and his servants had seen that process at work times beyond counting. Mourning for the loss of the body usually came first; the shock and grief for the breaking of the perfected partnership that was life. For cold and heat, hunger and thirst, light in the eyes, the weight and strength of the limbs, the long history that over the centuries had been engraved into muscle and bone. Then came the mourning for the past: for loved ones lost, for great works broken, for deeds ill done. Latest and hardest of all was the mourning for the future: for all that might have been and now would no longer be; for all that was to follow and could not now be prevented.

No one, neither Maia nor Vala, could force that understanding upon a soul, though Nienna the merciful was with them in their weeping. Truth was unhurried; truth kept, and there was nothing but truth in the cold halls of Mandos.

Celebrimbor was, and he was dead. There was no haste without life, nothing but silence and the chill of the real. At first there had been little order to his understanding, memory and thought lying scattered like papers after a high wind had blown through the workroom window. The slow trust of the survivors of Angband. Silence thick and bitter in his mouth in Nargothrond. Blood on his sword on the dark shores of Alqualonde. The hard-won respect from the Stone-Lords of Khazad-dum beneath the mountains. But the great desire of his heart was fiery and unmistakeable, and the presence of his father was a constant against which he could begin to reconstruct who he had been.

As he grew stronger, after a time he rose and looked into the past, into the great tapestries kept by the Weaver and her servants. He traced Eregion’s rise, watched the city that had been his grow strong and beautiful. Among the thousand interweaving stories he followed the silver threads of knowledge and craft. He saw his art meet Sauron’s, and merge and intertwine, and he saw everything that came after.  He looked for a long time at the end of it, at the pillar of light where the Mírdain had been, at the waters that poured in over the leveled city.

Some feelings were lessened in death. Without the body to retain them, they passed quickly and were gone. Others were rendered shockingly intense by the absence of the flesh that in life might have dampened them or distracted the spirit by its mute constant demands.

With all that he was, he mourned the loss of all that had been. That place of welcome and learning and deep craft was gone, swallowed up by the past as surely as the waters. And though he might one day return to the world – the very thought was too heavy to be borne for long – what of the person he had died to bring down?

He reached out toward that terrible light that showed the unmaking of a god, but his hands were only a memory, and there was nothing in the past that could be touched.

“Mandos...” he said, and it was an appeal and a summons. He spoke to the realm and the one who ruled it, and Námo was with him and around him.

Mandos seemed to him part fortress and part prison, part mathematical induction and part gray-robed judge. Celebrimbor’s thought had always been at ease with multiple modes of understanding. Still, it was only a fragment of his nature that answered the spirits who called upon him; the full weight of his presence could injure even the Dead.

“Annatar – Sauron – what has happened to him?” he whispered. “Lord of the Fates of Arda, where is he?”

“Nowhere my authority can reach him.” The words of Mandos happened in his thought; they seemed to have always been there.

“He is exactly where you sent him.” But perhaps even Mandos noticed the sharp grief that rang through him. The weight of Fate’s attention upon him grew heavier and hard to bear. “Are you regretting what you asked of him?”

There was nothing that he could say to that. There was only the past: his city broken and his people slaughtered, the lonely struggle, the knife-edge balance between loss and unimaginable loss. Annatar beside him at the end, the desperate trust in his fading eyes, the pressure of his hand.

 

Death was solitary, or nearly so, with full contact between the spirits of the Dead requiring a fullness of shared understanding only possible between the closest of kin: family of blood or of choice. Celebrimbor knew that his companions of the Mírdain, who had died for his deeds and Annatar’s, also dwelt somewhere in the shadowed realms. _Somewhere,_ he thought, but there was no _where_ , there was only a difference in states. _Somehow_ , then, his beloved companions, his brothers and sisters in learning, contended in solitude with the truth that was theirs and theirs alone. If he faced them again, to ask for forgiveness, it could only be when they were ready to live as well as remember.

His father was the only one who was constantly with him; his mother had returned to the world long since and now dwelt among the living. At one time, fleetingly, like the glint of wild eyes from a shadowed wood, he felt the presence of his uncle, who had been Celegorm the Cruel and Celegorm the Fair, and was now hardly more than a memory. He never saw his grandfather at all, that figure of fire and pride, though he knew from his father that Fëanor had kept vigil at Curufin’s side during that last terrible struggle in Ost-in-Edhil, when the last of his line blazed and went out.

He grew stronger. The absence of his body was a trouble to him; he cast about for an understanding that did not rely on physical terms: _pull, burn, itch, ache._ He missed it, and even that desire was thin and unsatisfying without the body to anchor and amplify it.  He tried to relax into abstraction, to feel the spirit untethered and free to soar through the rarified realms of thought that he had loved to explore in his life. But the memory of physical existence was a poor substitute for the ability to move, to sketch and labor and pace and call up the hidden wisdom of the body.

Beyond all other things, the memory of Annatar burned at him, sweetness and distress together. It was inconceivable that he should belong only to the past. _The light in his doorway, the voice from the fire, the touch of a hand on his own…_

He studied the problem from a thousand impossible angles. At one point he set himself to contemplation of the nature and work of the Weaver, who oversaw the transition from present into past. In the past, after all, Annatar still existed. But even if that transition could be replicated and reversed, he realized, it would do his purposes no good. He did not seek Annatar as he had been, but Annatar as he had chosen to be.

Doubt bit at him. Was there any sense in which that person could be said to exist? Sauron had chosen to undo himself; bound his being into Art and then destroyed it. Celebrimbor considered those doubts, turned them over, rejected them. There was a meaning to Annatar’s final choice, there must be some sense in which he still existed.

Where was he now? _Nowhere my authority can reach him._ Beyond the power of Fate, then, beyond consequences. Celebrimbor called up the memory of his body: weight, pressure, flying robes, and he paced along the the borders of Mandos as if feeling for a way out. He addressed himself to those walls, for those seemed most to speak of the presence of the Judge: black, flat, cool and implacable.

“Lord Námo,” he said, “what would it mean for you to die?”

There was no surprise at the impertinence of the question, only a wordless rejection of the terms. _Life_ was a term that could be applied only metaphorically to the Powers, and Mandos did not deal in metaphor. Celebrimbor considered, and adjusted the parameter of the question.

“For you to no longer exist in Arda – what would have to happen?”

“Causality would have to fail,” said Mandos, “and Doom to cease. Further I cannot say, that is beyond consequence.”

This was of little help. He considered presenting a hypothetical: _if you had bound your being to some creation, and that creation was destroyed, what would become of you?_ But he had learned enough from his time in the Halls that he saw already the dead-end of the question, the smooth black wall before him.

“I am ready, Mandos, ready, Doomsman; let me go to seek him.”

Mandos did not laugh at him; Mandos did not laugh. “Peace, small one,” said the Judge. “Do you think you are the first to love and die?”

He did not say _he is beyond your reach._ He did not say _what do you believe remains of what you loved?_ He had no need to.

“I will find him again,” Celebrimbor said, resting the memory of his head against the smooth wall. “Hear me, Doomsman, if I have to crack the course of the world I will find him again; if I have to venture beyond the Gates of Night –”

“Are you so eager to swear oaths, Curufinwë?”

The rebuke passed through him; it did not lodge and fester as it might have done to a living spirit, but it shook him.

“Do you truly desire to take up again the burden of the possible?” the soundless voice went on.  “Many who died as you did rejoice in relief from the body. When the flesh has been used as a weapon against the spirit, the repair of that relationship is a long labor.”

Even the memory of pain was muted now, like a closed book. “If the labor must be long, let me begin it.”

It was not a wall he was resting his head against, but a fold of the hem of the Judge’s robe. Death was so frustratingly real, and even though he could not shape that frustration into the words – or the memory of words – Mandos answered him nonetheless.

“Yes, for unreality you must go to my brother. This is the land without possibility. We deal with what has been and what must be; you must be what you are before you are ready to be anything else.”

 

He wandered a long time in the darkness, past the limits of words, past the limits of his own memory, through a world that he could not act upon. He paced through history, an expanse of time so vast that all he had known in his long life in the world diminished to a dimensionless point, as all of Arda did beneath the stars. But even in that great emptiness a spark burned: wonder and remembrance.

_Was this Eä as you saw it? That was from a distance greater even than this, when the gods sang together and the world was given being from their song. Are you there now, Annatar, outside the bounds of the world?_

_Who could see this and not desire to act upon it, to enter into it, to be joined to it?_

The first star shone in the limitless void. No, not a star, but a memory of creating an image of a star. The cool stone beneath his fingers, the song-bonded _ithildin_ laid out in thin precise lines, giving back to the stars their own remembered light. The sound of water, the memory of the gates -

The gates.

He set his hand against them and felt the give: thought giving way to substance, stability to change, death to life. They were not walls. Perhaps they never had been. And beyond them -

As a runner who glimpses the ending post, a mariner who sees the shadow of land on the horizon, he was filled with a hope so strong it was almost substance. It sang through him, it yearned towards the world. His father was beside him. Celebrimbor would have taken his hand, drawn him towards life, but Curufin was only a shadow among other shadows. The light of Celebrimbor’s purpose shone clear, and Curufin drew back.

“You cannot mean to seek him out.”

“I mean to try. Father, that is the spirit that you gave me; I must try.”

No words, only a tangle of love and bitter regret, mingled with a sharp puzzlement: _but how?_

“Do you not see them?” The gates shone before him.

“Only the walls.”

He knew it as Curufin spoke, and running through his fierce yearning towards life – an irresistible pull now, like gravity, or the rushing of a river – came a cold strain of sorrow.  His father saw it, and gently turned it aside. “Live, live, Curufinwë, you were meant for it. I will – I shall see you there one day. When I can.”

The gates parted before him and he stepped out into the world.

 

It was the strangest sensation he had felt in his life or after it; as if he were growing simultaneously lighter and heavier. Physical existence crashed over him, transferred in an instant from memory into living truth. His feet had weight on the ground, the scent of the air was cool and faintly sea-tinged, the sky above him was blue-white shading into gold where the sun was sinking toward the West. An eagle circled, far off in the shining heights.  

He looked toward the sky, his heart hungry, wondering if he would fall if he took a step. The vertigo passed, leaving him charged with a rising vigor, as if he had woken from something deeper than sleep. Drawing a deep breath, he turned his eyes from the heavens, for a last look at the Halls of the Dead before he set off into the world.

The outlines of the gates were already fading back into the smooth black rock of Mandos’ walls. But he paid them no heed. Beside the walls, paler than they but no less still, stood Annatar.

He stood as he had stood for centuries, while the stars moved slowly through their great dance above him and the wind from the edge of the world carried the breath of the sea, and sometimes spoke of stranger places beyond.

They had not trusted him to wait, the greater gods. Manwë’s attention had been often turned towards him. Námo’s cold thought had often rested upon him as he waited, evaluating whether his stillness presaged some scheme. A thousand years, to the Ainur, were little more than a breath or a thought to one of the Children of Eru, nonetheless, when Mairon had dwelt among them, he had been restless and impatient, burning to act upon the world.

But still he waited, as he had never waited before in his immeasurable existence: neither nursing his wounds nor biding his time, but simply existing, suspended. The world happened against him. The unfading grass grew around his feet. At one point a tiny translucent spider built a web between his fingers as they rested at his side.

The wards of Mandos were strong and he jealously guarded the solitude of the souls that he housed. There had been no warning to tell of the day that Celebrimbor might return.  It simply happened, one late afternoon, and the world was changed.

At several points, throughout his long vigil, he had thought of the things that he might say when he saw his old friend, his onetime enemy, again. Now, faced with the reality, they were all gone, everything was gone. There was only the person standing before him: his strong subtle spirit, his capable hands, his familiar face that had been, for a very long time, the only thing Annatar could remember clearly. His clothes were colorless and his black hair unbound and his grey eyes were darkened now with a shadow the sun could not dispel, but he was alive, and it was enough.

He was before him, strong and whole and alive and beautiful, staring at him with a dozen different emotions at once all sounding through his spirit like a chord. Slowly, but without doubt or hesitation, Celebrimbor moved toward him, the edges of his spirit lapping at his own. _It’s you. It’s you –_

His friend reached out one hand as if he meant to touch his face, then, without warning, pulled him into his arms. He clung to him fiercely, desperately, as if he never meant to let him go.

“ _Annatar,”_ he said, muffled against his neck.

Gentle as phase transition, like water released into air, understanding swept through him and altered his state. An order took hold on the universe and many things grew clear to his sight, as if a lens had been adjusted: that is _far,_ that is _near._

_“Thou my lens –”_

From the abstract realms of pure thought in which there is neither time nor space, particularity crystallized across his understanding. A precipitate polarity in the uniform universe: this is _you,_ this is _I._

Annatar reached up and closed his arms around Celebrimbor, feeling his body against him solid and warm with the work of life. The blood beat beneath his fingers, diffusing twinned oxygen into the flesh; the slower dance of the lymph, the electric scintillation along the nerves. And housed within, his spirit surged against him, tiny and finite and so much greater than his own.

Heedless and hungry as a flame for fuel, Celebrimbor kissed him, his hand knotted in his hair to pull his head back and turn toward him the mouth, the throat, the long smooth curve of the jaw. Annatar felt himself answering, not melting at his touch, but rather taking on form and purpose, direction and desire. He grew more real with every indrawn breath; he ran his hands up the broad lines of his back and felt, rather than heard, a wordless cry against his skin.   

Not even joy beyond speech could separate Celebrimbor from his nature: he laughed and wept and analyzed even as he kissed him as though he meant to devour. There were teeth at the edge of his kisses and sharp half-formed questions in his thought, welling up before he had even worked out how to form into words: inchoate variations of _how?_ He wrenched himself back, just far enough so that he could look at Annatar, so that he could free his mouth enough to allow for speech.

“I was ready to seek you – I was already at work upon the theory – beyond the gates of Night – but to find you here, Annatar, here –”

Then, sudden and forceful and demanding, Annatar felt his mind against his own. _Annatar, show me. If you are no dream drawn from the shape of my desire, show me who you are-_

He denied him nothing. Celebrimbor had never been able to fathom Annatar’s spirit, but he could recognize it, with the simple and perfected ease with which his eyes had recognized how to see when the light shone upon them again. It was changed, strangely changed in a way that Celebrimbor had no immediate means of describing, but it was his friend’s, of that at least he had no doubt whatsoever.

Pressing deeper into Annatar’s opening thought, he unfurled the immediate past: the unchanging centuries spent by the Halls of the Dead, the whirling colloquy of the Powers seated in judgement around him. Then _confusion_ , then _wonder_ – neither of those were Annatar’s wont – and then he found himself looking into something which even in memory, even twice-muted and twice-modulated through lesser understandings, came near to blasting thought and sense from him altogether. There was something there, in the emptiness after death and before rebirth, that looked back at him with a splendid and terrible recognition.

He clutched at Annatar to steady himself, fingers digging into his shoulders, and slowly drew back from infinity and into the present.

Annatar was looking at him, and for one small strangeness, at least, he could find words. “Annatar,” he said, “your eyes.”

“What?  I have come –” a look almost of confusion crossed his face, “a very long way, Tyelperinquar.”

“Yes, I saw!” Celebrimbor’s laughter was not steady, nor easily distinguished from tears. “But _think_ about this, Annatar, go on…”

Annatar blinked. His grey eyes flickered. “These are the eyes that I remembered. The last thing I saw –”

“Yes, well, those are mine, and I can tell you right now I am not going to spend the rest of the ages of Arda gazing into my own eyes. Get your own. I liked your eyes.”

Annatar looked puzzled, and Celebrimbor felt a soft, groping touch on his mind, like someone feeling out the contours of his face in the dark. Sudden pity rose within him and he welcomed him into his thought far more gently than he had pulled his body to his own. _Beloved, do you not remember who you were?_

Carefully, like someone turning over the pages of a precious volume, Annatar read over himself as Celebrimbor remembered him. The sun was lower in the sky when he drew back, and looked him in the face, his eyes blossoming from silver into gold.

“There is much that I have – forgotten,” he said, as if unaccustomed to the use of the word. He reached up for Celebrimbor’s hand on his shoulder, and took it in his own, studying it as if he could read there what it was that he had lost, or perhaps regained. He ran his fingertips over the surface of his hand, so lightly that they caught on the ridges of his skin.

“Annatar,” said Celebrimbor, concerned, “have you – have you been hurt?”

“I have been _dead,”_ he said. Celebrimbor clasped his hand tightly, hard enough to feel the slender bones.

“But now I have seen you,” Annatar said quietly after a moment. “You live. That is enough. And I will – I will leave you now. If you wish it.” His hand tightened around his own, and Celebrimbor could not tell if it were a plea or a valediction.

“If I – Annatar, have you been paying even the slightest bit of attention? I know you’ve been dead, but surely you cannot possibly have missed – and _enough_ ? No, I will never believe that death has altered you so much. _Enough?_ Look me in the face, Annatar, and tell me that you, _you,_  will shrink away from what you want.”

Annatar looked at him and said nothing, but he raised his hand to his lips, and smiled as he pressed them against the backs of his fingers. Celebrimbor felt the smile as if it had been a kiss, its energy and warmth and sudden possessive focus spreading across his hand.

“Did you just adjust your height?” Celebrimbor demanded, laughing again, feeling the angle of his body alter against his own.

“I was slightly taller than you,” said Annatar with great dignity, “and since you seem determined that we resume our former relationship –”

He met his eyes, bright silver to gold, burning with resolve and desire. “Our former relationship? Never. That is in the past, beloved; they are dead who labored as friends, and they are dead who struggled as foes. Yet you are here with me; I will not be parted from you again.”

Annatar looked at him, his eyes alight like the sun sinking in liquid fire toward the Outer Sea.

“You are mine,” Celebrimbor said, low and resolute, “if you will have me.”

Annatar turned his hand in his own. Gently he uncurled Celebrimbor’s fingers and pressed his lips to the hollow of his palm. The sweet shock that ran through him at the touch, light as it was, might have left him doubled and staggering, but he clung to his purpose with ferocious determination.

“ _From this day forth_ ,” Celebrimbor began, carefully, in a form of the language so ancient that the shape of the words were far closer to those that had been spoken in the darkness of the Great Journey than to any now spoken on either side of the Sea, _“thou art to me as myself. By my name –”_

The sound that Annatar made might have been a shout of laughter or a quick choked cry. “Curufinwë Tyelperinquar, are you making this up here and now on Námo’s doorstep?”

“Of course I’m not _making it up,_ these are in fact the traditional vows of my people that I am modifying to suit our particular situation, there’s a part in there for the parents that I’ve cut out, of course, and usually one of the partners isn’t a minor deity; it’s not altogether unprecedented but Doriath left no documentation, so a certain degree of improvisation is to be expected, now stop interrupting while I marry you.” He wanted to laugh, but could not. His heart hammered in his throat; he felt wound to a strain near madness. It seemed to him that all around the lines of the fate of the world were stretching thin, pulled by his words into new and alien directions.

 _“By my name I swear it, by thy name I swear it, by the Name that is uttered by all of Eä. Between thee and me shall there be union forever, my heart to thy heart, my soul to thy soul, my body to thy body. This my oath hear and remember, Manwë and Varda! May it stand in the keeping of the One unto the ending of the world._ ”

He caught his breath as Annatar studied him. Then, as solemn and courtly as if they had been lords of their people at some great festival rather than two gray-clad wanderers on the edge of the world, at the gates of the halls of the Dead, Annatar took both of his hands in his and began to speak.

The syllables were song and force, they were music and math together. They rang in his ears and set his eyes watering, and when he heard his names spoken in one of the resplendent sentences, he thought that he must surely lose his footing on the solid earth.

“Annatar, what –”

“You took none of your centuries with Námo to learn the language of the Powers?” It was Annatar’s turn to laugh at him. “No, I suppose he rarely troubles to use words…” and he slipped again into those words of melodious clamor like a full tower of bells all sounding at once.

If Celebrimbor had felt the lines of fate draw thin at his words, at Annatar’s they multiplied and danced. They were not lines at all but curves: spinodes and arcs and marvelous spirals, endless worlds being made and unmade at once. He felt himself drawn out and defined, known within and without, an immersed submanifold being mapped onto a complex polydimensional space.

“Do you seriously mean to make promises to me in a language I don’t understand?” He could not longer see anything of the world but those transforming shapes; could scarcely tell where his being left off and Annatar’s began.

“I think you understand me perfectly well,” said Annatar’s voice, right in his ear. At some point he must have dropped his solemnity, because they were locked together now, Celebrimbor’s back pressed against the smooth stone of the Halls, Annatar’s hands reading over the new-made musculature of his shoulders and neck. “However, if you insist on a translation, I shall repeat to you in the body what I have spoken to you in words –”

“We should consider leaving Námo’s doorstep,” Celebrimbor put in, gasping with laughter and at the feel of Annatar’s hands in his hair. For a moment Annatar appeared reluctant to break away from him for even so short a time, but on considering the alternative, took a brief look around them.

“The forest,” he said, pointing the short way eastward down the green slope, toward where the shadows were beginning to lengthen among the ancient trees. “That is not Námo’s domain.”

“And I don’t know that this is any of his business,” Celebrimbor agreed, setting off beside him at a pace so rapid it was nearly a run.

“Well, now you’ve made it Manwë’s business, and Varda’s. I did not know that you had grown so pious.”

“Let them be witness! I am not ashamed to choose you; perhaps they can learn something from that-” Annatar laughed aloud, with more merriment and less calculation than Celebrimbor had ever heard from him. He pushed his hair out of his face where it had been blown by their speed and the rising evening breeze. “But you did not name them, I am almost certain –”

“I did not,” Annatar said, and did not elaborate.

They gained the forest’s edge. There was no wind within, only the long warm light slanting along the ground, turning the forest floor to a pattern of light and shadow, and setting the fallen golden leaves ablaze with color. By one consent they moved deeper into the woods, snapping twigs and snagging branches in their haste, following no path save only where the going was easiest, until they could look behind them and see no glimpse of the black Halls on their low mountain.

There was silence between them then, broken only by breath more ragged than even their speed could have justified. In that pause that seemed to leave the unheard music that had been building between them poised at the point of resolution, Celebrimbor turned to Annatar, who appeared almost perfectly composed, though he felt his spirit wound to the same snapping-point tension as his own.  His long bright hair showed no hint of disarray, and his grey robes – apparently of the same seamless material as Celebrimbor’s own – were carefully draped in a manner that suggested the _vaima_ of the Vanyar.

Celebrimbor ran his hand through his hair, letting it slip heavy and lustrous and silk-fine through his fingers and fall back shining against cloth and skin. Annatar murmured in his throat and closed his eyes for a moment, but opened them again almost immediately, as if unwilling to yield even a moment of the sight of him. Celebrimbor let the back of his fingers come to rest lightly against his chest. The heat of Annatar’s skin was radiant through the cloth.

He studied the topology of the robes for a minute, reached up to his shoulder, and with one small gesture, pulled apart a single fold. The drapery collapsed in graceful, heavy waves that caught the sunset as they fell. Annatar stepped free of the cloth around his feet.

Looking at him as if he were a new-cast figure fresh from the mold, Celebrimbor drew in his breath, with the astonished satisfaction of an artist stepping back from his work and seeing the pattern whole for the first time.  Annatar met his eyes, and there was less of composure now in his face and bearing. The air around him rippled as if with heat haze.

Somewhere in the back of his mind Celebrimbor knew that this had to be deliberate; even the most delicate Vanyarin styles of drapery took more than a single gesture to undo. And then he thought of another encounter, on the other side of the sea and the gulf of death, and he could not stifle his laughter, though he tried, bending nearly double in the effort.

“What’s so funny?” Annatar demanded.

“We’ve just answered that old question,” he gasped, “your clothes really _can_ come off-” Annatar attempted very briefly to maintain a sober dignity, but he rapidly judged it not worth the effort and joined him in his laughter.

Celebrimbor got control of himself and straightened up. Merriment and solemnity had been passing across them both, like the light and shadow from high clouds on a windy day. He moved toward Annatar, about to take him in his arms, and hesitated.

“I understand the exchange of rings would be traditional at this point,” he said, “but –” He stopped at the look on Annatar’s face.

“You _wouldn’t._ ” Annatar seized him by the waist, undoing his own far simpler garment with quick efficient practicality.

“Well, I _can’t_.” He was clutching at Annatar’s shoulders, speaking nonsense now, talking just to talk, to hold fierce need at bay. “Look at where we are! No tools, nothing!”

“I will be thy forge,” he said into his ear, “thy hammer and anvil, thy steel and flame...” His hands were at work upon him, his spirit rising up to enfold his own, and Celebrimbor felt himself engulfed, borne down, ignited.

He thought he knew fire; he had worked with it all his life, he had summoned it to serve his great creation. He had been burned. But even that was knowledge not of fire, but of fire’s work. This was fire itself, an incandescence of the body and spirit as matter yielded up the light and heat within it.

His understanding shifted and opened, with Annatar’s in it and around it and part of it. It was as if molten gold had gone as clear as water, and he could sink down into it, layer upon layer, through depths that burned without pain. It was at once a vast and undiscovered universe, and the immediate tangible reality of the person in his arms, the body laboring against his own.

 

The world came and went, now narrowed to the compass of their limbs, now blotted out altogether in nameless splendid colors, now musty and prickly and immediate. At some point he had staggered to his feet, brushing leaves and twigs from back and flanks and forearms,long enough to repurpose their discarded garments into a cover for the chill ground. Annatar had muttered something unflattering – “ _carrying on like the river-Edain at Midsummer-”_ and pulled him down again.

The moon was halfway up the sky, he noticed, glimpsing it through the leaves. So unlike Melian and Thingol they had not been hundreds of years at their union, or if they had been, his returning awareness of the world was exceptionally well synchronized. He laughed and felt Annatar feel his laughter. They had laughed so much that night, echoing across both their joined spirits, until words and laughter were lost together.

Annatar paused and lifted his head. “Hm.”

“What do you mean, _hm_ , I refuse to believe that you suddenly find yourself _at a loss_ –”

“It’s different than I pictured it. That’s all.”

Celebrimbor pushed himself up on his elbows. “Firstly, if that’s your idea of amorous nothings, this is where _some people_ would just get up and walk out, although I will add as a footnote that it is gratifying to hear you apparently pictured this; and secondly, what are you talking about?”

Annatar was looking at his abdomen, his expression unreadable. “Your scar is gone.”

Celebrimbor craned his neck, looking down at the smooth lines of his own body in the moonlight. “I suppose it is.  I can’t say I ever thought about it much.”

“It was just here.” Annatar traced one finger from beneath the ribs to the curve of the opposite hip, painless fire following his touch.

“You remember that better than I do.” Celebrimbor settled back against the ground, where the versatile grey robe was serving for a blanket, but Annatar, perturbed, did not follow.  

“Well, I _would_.” The seamed black scar had troubled him from the moment the quiet, self-possessed master of the Mírdain had told him its story, a world away and more than a lifetime ago. _That I got at the rout of Tol Sirion._ He had remembered that assault – a brilliantly successful one, which had established the reach of Angband further into Beleriand than it had ever yet attained. The defenders of the Noldorin fortress on the river had been thrown into utter disarray, taken as prisoners or driven into the forest to flee for their lives. And he had been there, the person before him, wounded by his own proud sorceries, slipping down into the half-life of the houseless spirits Gorthaur commanded. _My life was despaired of._

He pushed the thought aside. “Still, I’m surprised you don’t remember it better. How else are you going to learn from it? You very nearly _died –”_

“I very actually died,” Celebrimbor pointed out, “although that did come later, and I’m still not sure what I’ve learned from it. Certainly not to keep less dangerous company.” He wound a hand in his hair and pulled him closer, hard enough to hurt; he dragged his nails across his back and heard him hiss. Annatar turned his attention back to the present, and felt Celebrimbor respond, his body turning hot and pliant under his hands, like spooled glass in a flame. He bent to kiss him along the old scar’s unmarked path.

Celebrimbor threw his head back with a wordless, broken sound, which struck Annatar suddenly with its terrible familiarity. He looked up sharply. Celebrimbor’s eyes were half-closed and his face tilted back, wearing an expression of intense interiority very like one he had seen before.

He froze, and pulled away.

For the second time Celebrimbor sat up and looked hard at him, realizing, without either needing to speak, to just what time and place Annatar had returned. There was no sound but his quickened breath gradually slowing into its accustomed rhythm. He marshalled his thoughts, slowly pulling them back from shape and sense into words.

“You told me once, Annatar – no, you told me at least a dozen times in as many different ways – not to cringe away from greatness. That’s – that is not the only thing we cannot cringe away from.” He reached out, steady and deliberate, and took hold of his arm. “Eregion’s not going to _not have happened;_ Tol Sirion’s not going to not have happened; I’m never going to be someone you didn’t hurt –” He would have gone on, but stopped at what it was he saw on Annatar’s face.

Instead, he leaned forward and kissed him, carefully and ungently, with the same force and precision he used in cold-forging deoxidized copper. And like the strain-hardened metal, he felt Annatar grow stronger at the stress, and then there were hands in his hair, at his hips, running down the long muscles in the thighs, and his attempts to plot the yield strength of his partner’s soul dissolved in sparks.

He could not have said when he slipped into slumber, but he did eventually sleep; at some point body and spirit yielded to exhaustion, and he drifted in light and gold and fire.

 

Annatar did not sleep, being perfectly content to curl around Celebrimbor and contemplate him: the rise and fall of his sleep-saturated breath, the glitter and spark of his multifaceted spirit, luxuriating in the consciousness of possession; endlessly fascinated by the fact of him.

He could have watched him so indefinitely, but when morning came he felt him waking. Celebrimbor stirred, stretched, opened his eyes; the quiet shimmer of sleep over his soul turning to glowing awareness. His mind still lay open, mapped onto his, and Annatar felt the returning consciousness of his body: the sweet ache in body and limb, the pleasant lethargy, his own taste, mineral and salt, in his parched mouth -

All at once something closed over Celebrimbor’s mind, hard and black and shiny as the carapace of an insect. He pulled away from Annatar, straining to breathe, his hand at his throat.

“Tyelperinquar?”

His mind might be shut off from him, but there was no need of particular intimacy or even particular insight to recognize what gripped him now: terror, as swift and savage as any he had ever sought to cause in a fleeing enemy or a helpless prisoner.

He felt the cold racing across his skin where he still held him; perhaps he ought to let him go. “Tyelperinquar, what is it?”

Celebrimbor’s head snapped up, his eyes wide and nearly black. There was no recognition in them. Then there was, and everything became much worse, for as he recognized who held him, the fear flared bright and sickening past even those lightless defenses he had thrown up around his mind. Annatar could hear him counting – no, not counting exactly, but numbering his labored breaths, focusing on their properties. _18\. 16 in base 12. 12 in base 16. See it drop into place in the figurate heptagon. Turn. 19. The eighth prime. 17 in base 12 –_

He must have picked it up among his memories at some point when Celebrimbor’s thought stood open to him, because he could hear Maedhros’s instructions, stern but not unkind. _Battle-terror is only your enemy if you cannot control it; master your breath and you will master your fear. Count. Again, Tyelperinquar –_ He saw the scarred face with a strange double vision: mingled respect and dread for his grim uncle; mild interest in Melkor’s prize captive.

Celebrimbor had gotten enough control over himself to get to his feet. “Excuse me,” he said, the words blunted through numb lips. He turned and set off into the forest.

Annatar did not care to examine whether the cold fear singing along his bones was his own, or an echo of Celebrimbor’s. From very far away came an echo of old defeats: _surrender, hide, change shape –_

He fought it down. This was not defeat, it could not be defeat. He shook the leaves off his robe and pulled it around himself. After a moment, carefully modulating his movements so as not to suggest pursuit, he began to follow.

 

There was no difficulty in tracing his path, and soon the sound and scent of water ran bright and unmistakable through the morning forest. Cresting a rill, he came upon the stream itself, where it splashed down over a series of rocks to create a miniature suggestion of a waterfall.

Celebrimbor was sitting half-submerged on a rock by the deepest section, where the falling water had hollowed out a pool. His grey wrap lay discarded on the bank, and he sat with his head in his hands. His hair streamed with water; he must have been bathing. At Annatar’s approach he raised his head, but at least this time there was no sharp spike of terror, only a blunt exhaustion.

“I assure you,” he said, seeing that Annatar was waiting for him to speak, “that startled me as much it did you.” He looked rueful. “It’s passed off now, I think.”

“What was that?” Annatar’s voice was as carefully neutral as it had ever been in the halls of Ost-in-Edhil, where a single conversational miss-step could lead to attention, doubt, dangerous questions.

“Thirst; I woke thirsty, and it seemed to me –” The decision not to spare Annatar’s feelings passed in the space between one breath and the next. “It seemed to me I was back in Eregion, back in the workshop with you. The thirst with no relief, knowing you’re being destroyed and you can’t stop it... And though I knew I wasn’t, that knowledge didn’t matter somehow, as if I couldn’t convince the body – my body,” he corrected himself belatedly, “of what my spirit knew to be true. I’m told it can take a while, after returning to the world, for _hroa_ and _fëa_  to re-establish their partnership. Since it was interrupted under adverse circumstances.” He looked pointedly at Annatar from under his dripping hair.

“You can drink.” It occurred to him as he spoke that this might sound like mockery.

“Can and do.” Celebrimbor held his cupped hands under the falling stream and drank deeply, with less control than Annatar would have preferred to see. “Thirst after exertion ought to be pleasant; a desire that anticipates satisfaction. And yet, here we are.”

Cautiously Annatar moved down the bank. “I would prefer it if you did not do that again.”

A bark of laughter. “So would I!” He dropped his head again. “Do you know, I really did think it would be all right when I saw you? It wasn’t all just ecstatic madness. I had wondered how it would be to see you again, whether I could… And then you were there, beyond hope or expectation, and there was nothing in my heart but joy.”

“Tyelperinquar, you know you have nothing to fear from me. Any more.”

“Yes Annatar thank you I do know that,” he said tightly.

“But you are afraid.”

“What do you want me to tell you?” In moments of strong emotion Celebrimbor had always preferred silence and retreat; being called upon to respond made him snappish. “Look at you standing there like Alagos waiting for some poor apprentice to realize he’s been caught in a contradiction! Do you think that _my own inconsistency_ is, is persuasive, is somehow a _comfort_ to me?”

The connection between them was a living, pulsing thing; it was only a very slight effort on Celebrimbor’s part that laid his mind open to him. It was darkened, echoing like a hollow hall with remembered pain and fear. Image and sound reverberated without pattern or sense: shifting maps of the lost territory of the body, and underneath it a thin whisper: _mercy, have mercy._ He stared at him, appalled.

“Don’t _you_ start being afraid of me,” Celebrimbor said miserably, “just because I can hurt you now.”

Annatar studied him, cold and careful and thorough and unhappy. “What,” he demanded at last, “can I do?”

The question was a real demand and not a rhetorical opening. Celebrimbor looked up.

“What sort of proof do you require that _you won?_ ” He spoke with the agonized composure of real desperation. “I really don’t know how else I can persuade you. I gave up my vision. I surrendered it to yours. I unmade my works, myself, for you; _is that not enough?_ I have nothing else that I can offer.”

Celebrimbor said nothing, but moved his head very slightly: _come here._ After a moment Annatar shrugged off his wrap and stepped gingerly into the water. It was surprisingly deep for so narrow a stream. The quick clear waters came swirling and splashing up past his waist, and Celebrimbor almost managed laughter seeing the expression on his face.

“Anyone would think water really would dissolve you; you look like a cat that – do you remember when Spider knocked over a jar of granulation adhesive and tracked it all over the workshop, and we had to give her a bath? She looked exactly like you do now.”

Annatar gave him his best look of wounded dignity; as he had hoped, Celebrimbor really did laugh this time. Making his way up the channel, he perched beside him on the dark stone, worn smooth from the work of the water. Slipping deeper into the pool, Celebrimbor found a comfortable rock where he sat and settled against his knees. After a minute Annatar began to work his fingers through his hair, braiding the fine dark strands that he had pulled apart so often before.

As the intricate braids were being woven, he felt him beginning to relax – a real peace, and not the will to peace – though wrung-out and aching with the aftermath of intense fear. “One of your men gave me water,” Celebrimbor said suddenly, without turning his head. “It was – you’d been away for a while, and I don’t think they had any more idea than I did of whether you’d be coming back. I don’t know whether he knew Sindarin. I don’t suppose he had to, really, to know what I was asking. It was a great kindness, and a dangerous one…”

The deft motion of Annatar’s fingers through his hair never faltered; Celebrimbor was grateful for it. “I hope he didn’t – I hope you didn’t –”

“I would have,” Annatar admitted. “If I had known.”

It was the first time he had considered the fate of the troops Sauron had brought with him from his empire in the East. “They all must have died,” he said softly,  “in the –”

“I don’t know if anything remains of the city.” Annatar was braiding a topological demonstration of some sort into his hair, trefoils and cinquefoils and higher-order torus knots. His fingers stilled for a moment. “Yes,” he said, and his voice was distant, “I can see nothing of Ost-in-Edhil at all; only the memory. It might be the Sea between, it might be Death; it might be both really; there’s not a good way to test it.”

He wove the last braid into place, and Celebrimbor let his head fall back against his knees. Annatar’s skin was warm, entirely unaffected by the chill of the bright water. Distantly, academically, he felt the absurdity of the whole thing: a whole world lost; their highest dreams and mightiest labors. It seemed impossible to reconcile with the world as it was: solid and real and inhabited only by the two of them. The future seemed as unreachable as the past: where was there for them to go?  He drew a long breath and let it out in a shuddering sigh. “Everything we wanted, Annatar, it’s gone and I don’t know… I don’t know where we start.”

Annatar looked back at him, his eyes hard gold, and he had the unnerving impression that he was perfectly happy to wait for him to figure something out.

“I do know what I chose, choosing you…” He reached up and found his hand. “Perhaps we could just stay here for another Age or so.”

He had half-expected calm acquiescence, but instead it was Annatar’s turn to laugh at him. “What, shall we perch in the trees and sing like wood thrushes while the Sun grows old above us? No, I do know you a little, Tyelperinquar, death or no death; you must have something to be trying yourself against. Even now you look up.”

“Things will – take work.”

“How fortunate that neither of us shies away from work.” Annatar offered him a hand to help him up out of the water.

For the first time that morning he got a clear look at Annatar, and was astonished to see the marks that the previous night had left on him. His back was criss-crossed by thin bright scratches, and the bruises left by lips and teeth were darkening against his luminous skin.

“What is this, Annatar? Mud wouldn’t take hold on your garments; are you telling me you are more easily marked than your clothes?”

Annatar looked back at him, his expression unreadable.

“Curufinwë Tyelperinquar, _you are that which alters me._  Through the force of your vision you leave your mark upon my designs for Arda, and you’re surprised you can do the same to my body?”

The full implications of this were too enormous to be faced all at once; he picked the smallest facet he could think of. “Why, does that mean that I can make a work-braid hold in your hair at last?”

“You are welcome,” said Annatar, with a smile showing all his sharp teeth, “to try.”

 

The limits of his world had changed. He found them out only by testing them; now stumbling into them, now grasping them plainly. The strangenesses ran together: life in the body after the body’s destruction; Annatar beside him, whole and true and his, with a soul that was in some sense part of his own.

“I do not know who or what I am,” he whispered past Annatar’s head one night, and Annatar answered him, as was his wont at such moments, in a language he did not understand but whose meaning went straight through him.

They kept moving through the forest, quickly on some days and slowly on others, over fallen leaves and fallen needles and thick carpets of pale green moss. Brief cold rains came blowing in from the Outer Sea, and the great ferns around the bases of the trees unfurled to greet them. Great leaf-bearing trees spread far over their heads: black alders and hornbeams and velvet maples, and towering still farther above them, conifers and pines whose names he did not know, that either had never grown in Middle-Earth or that had been lost in the great upheavals before the awakening of his people. The trees were old, older than the sun and moon which they greeted every day in their ancient wordless language.

And yet, at the edges of his mind, he felt the presence of something older still. Annatar was pleased to dwell within the form that he had chosen, but he felt the pressure of that conscious choice, as steady as the beating of his heart. If not for him and for their bond, he knew, his companion might as easily be described as a shadow, a flame, a half-shaped creature all sodden pelt and dripping fangs, an intersection of a plane with a complex projective space.

They had not set themselves to follow a purposeful path. But though Celebrimbor had hardly the strength yet to ask _where are we going_ , he could not help but consider where they had been, project it forward to see what it implied. He looked at the forest and he saw it with a wider sight: not just the logic of root and soil and breathing foliage, but their own places in it.

“Oh that’s very interesting,” he said to himself.

Annatar looked at him curiously.

“This is not… a simple space. The geography of the forest is a function of who has returned to walk it.”

“Yes!” Annatar seemed deeply gratified at his understanding. “Well, of course, that’s true of the entire world, but it is true in particularly concentrated fashion of this place. The principle of its design is almost identical to that of Mandos itself, though the air is somewhat healthier. It will not end until you are ready, but as long as we keep walking as we are, we are walking toward the forest’s edge.”

“If we changed our course – in respect to reality, I mean, not our direction...” It was almost easier to see the coordinates that defined the space with his eyes closed. “Mandos this way, Lorien that way, Aman the other way.”

“You might have said _death behind us, dreams beside us, all the world before us,_ ” Annatar offered, quoting a line of poetry from a volume of Sindarin mysticism.

“Is _that_ what Thiadwen was referencing? And since when do you take an interest in the lore of the dream-scribes of the Ered Nimrais?”

“Poetry is math by other means,” said Annatar lightly, but he sensed his companion thinking back, as he did, to the lecture in the Great Hall of the Mírdain, recalling the conversation among journeymen and apprentices leaping and sparking like the fire in the braziers. Annatar looked at Celebrimbor sharply; the combinations of memory and sense that would send him into lightless terror were infrequent, but entirely unpredictable.

“We had better get home,” Celebrimbor said, “or at least back to somewhere with a decently equipped laboratory and a library. If a system as interconnected as a forest can be constructed as a dependent function – no, I _know_ it would take one or possibly several of the Powers to do that, but surely the principle can be applied on a smaller scale.” He flexed his fingers, casting about for something to sketch with, and settled on a twig. “Now help me clear off a patch of this ground, I need a clear flat surface.”

 

The passage of time in the quiet forests outside the Halls of the Dead, though, was hardly perceptible. “I suppose that makes sense,” Celebrimbor said one morning, reclining against a flat stone. He had been drifting in and out of a doze, and watching the sun through the leaves turning their veins to thin gold threads. “To come back to the world as quickly or as slowly as you please… It is harder than I thought it would be, even if some things –” he looked pointedly up at Annatar, who was lying flat across his chest, chin on his crossed arms – “turned out to be easier.”

Annatar merely blinked at him, as deliberate and insouciant as a cat, and Celebrimbor returned to contemplation of the leaves. He watched the interplay of shadows as the wind stirred them, the motion of the -

He paused, puzzled, realizing he did not know the word for the shifting quality he saw. “It _is_ different,” he said, half to himself. “Annatar, what color is that, along the edges of the leaves?”

The answer was a polysyllabic word in Valarin, but Celebrimbor had picked up enough to recognize it as a noun, and even some of the roots. “Life...death...green?”

“Close, though what you’re translating as _death_ would be better rendered _consume._ You can use it in the past perfect passive substantive to mean ‘death’, ‘the-state-of-having-been-consumed’, but here it’s just the root, the neutral form. You could translate it ‘life-eating green’ if you wanted, or ‘green that eats to live’.”

“Oh, _now_ you’ll translate for me, but you still won’t explain _ðæyez_ or _se-amallach_ or _aðil-mbozê-sa…_ ” Though he had heard the Valarin sequences over and over again, murmured against his hair or panted into his shoulder, he could still not replicate them accurately, far less attempt a translation. He know he was mangling the polytonic syllables, and the smugness of Annatar’s expression only confirmed it.

“I explained that to you both completely and accurately; I just wasn’t using words to do it. Must I repeat the exercise?”

Celebrimbor attempted to muster some rejoinder about how Annatar’s methods were enjoyable but entirely useless for developing a systematic syntactical understanding of the language of the gods, but instead let himself lie back against the rock again, watching the leaves transforming light into chemical energy, Annatar’s weight heavy and reassuring along his body.

“I didn’t know at first there was a difference,” he said meditatively. “I thought it might be  being back in Aman, or being back alive. My whole body is different, right through. But I definitely couldn’t _see photosynthesis_ before.” He glanced up at Annatar. “Is this a consequence of being your… consort? I’m going to have to revisit my treatise on optics.”

“What, the one we were working on those first years in Eregion? An excellent idea; it was a promising work but deeply limited in its initial form.”

Annatar spoke briskly, but, perhaps struck by something Celebrimbor had said, shifted back and sat up, running his eyes over his body, as gently as a caress.

“It really is completely different, isn’t it?”

“I dare say not a single particle of the original,” he said cheerfully, “though you’re probably still better equipped than me to say. It is – strange. I am not used to it. On the other hand, this is _me;_ I’m told that in returning to the world we take our forms from memory – the line our poets use is _from the soul’s loss, the body’s shape._ We are meant to be whole, and in that moment, that motion from death to life, we have the power to be what we are…”

He shook himself, shifting his shoulders against the stone. “Returning – it wasn't an effort exactly. I wasn't thinking about it at all. It was like remembering, when you know you've forgotten something but you can't remember what it was, and then suddenly there is, waiting for you. Only more comprehensive than remembering – like jumping into cold water, all at once... Is that what it's like for you, taking on form?” He studied the bright body above him with mingled appreciation and curiosity.

“I do not forget things,” said Annatar with great dignity, “and I do not jump into cold water.”

Celebrimbor refrained from challenging him on either point, but Annatar’s eyes had not left his body. He knew a little more of the nature of sight in the Maiar now, and he also felt the flow and swell of knowledge in the mind now as close to him as his own. Annatar was watching the intricate organic and chemical processes of his life, and finding them beautiful.

“You are so different from the memory,” he said quietly.

Celebrimbor sat up on his elbows, troubled. “In what particular?”

This was a question whose answer was so obvious that it posed him considerable difficulty in responding. “You answer me,” he said at last. “You are alive.”

“Oh! No, I do see what you mean. We Eldar make a similar distinction, you know; we consider the memory to be a distinct phase or aspect of a person. I do think I may speak for most of my kind here; the Moriquendi as well as the Calaquendi make this distinction.” Annatar’s weight across his hips might have been enough of a distraction to make him lose the thread of his thought; he suspected Annatar knew this perfectly well, so he redoubled his defiance. “You know, though, I’ve never yet encountered any Edain who do. Perhaps for them the realm of Memory is basically synonymous with that of Death?”

In the old days Annatar would have been drawn into the discussion directly, posing a question on the nature of memory, or citing customs he had observed in the East. But he remained silent, studying the person before him.

“I saw you die,” he said at last.

“You’ve seen so many of us die. It can’t have been that strange a sight.”

“I saw you die,” he said again, as if trying to explain the trouble of his thoughts. “You died so softly.”

“Well, two of us going up in a blaze of glory would have been overkill, wouldn’t it?” Celebrimbor lay back down against the stone. “Besides, I was happy; I wasn’t about to muster the sort of rage that leads to people’s bodies falling to ash and being borne away on the wind. It was only a question of whether I was going to bleed out before I drowned on my own blood – I was pretty thoroughly perforated at that point.”

He felt Annatar’s wince through his entire body. “Nothing,”  he said quietly, “has ever been so empty as the world was in that moment.”

Celebrimbor would have laughed, but he felt the real distress in his companion. He took his hand, threaded his fingers through his, pulled him back down against him.

“I am sorry. I would have stayed for you if I could.”

They remained so for a long time, face to face and hand in hand, the sun turning overhead and the rock slowly warming beneath them. The old wonder still thrummed through him: the freedom to gaze his fill on Annatar. Eventually he reached out and traced the edge of his ear with a fingertip. Annatar shut his eyes and made a low ragged sound in his throat, but Celebrimbor’s purposes were investigatory as well as appreciative.

“I was trying to figure out what was different about you,” he said. “About the way you look, I mean. It took me some time to spot it, because, well, the changes to my sight, and the way you can change your shape. But it’s simpler than that,” he went on, as Annatar started to explain. “No jewelry. You used to wear enough goldwork to supply a small workshop or ransom a minor ruler, and now…” Annatar’s ears were as bare as his fingers and throat; his skin met only skin.

“I was waiting for you.”

“And now?”

“Now?” said Annatar briskly, getting off him and reaching for his robe, “I am but a beggar at the gates of the Powers; they have vouchsafed me a bath-towel.”

This was not an entirely fair description of the durable length of colorless cloth, for the summer-wear of the Vanyar consisted of something very similar, with hundreds of different styles of draping expressing various nuances of meaning having developed over the untroubled ages in the Blessed Realm. Though Annatar had made no study of these customs, evidently he had observed something similar in the kingdoms of the East, and the intricate folds and pleats (which he changed subtly every time he reassumed the garment) were no less imposing for being unadorned. Celebrimbor, who would have happily have wrapped his own cloth around his waist like the bath towel Annatar had labeled it, felt obliged to keep up in topological complexity, and had already made several private notes on innovations to suggest to the sartorial scholars of Valmar.

Perhaps it was putting a name to his altered sight, perhaps it was simply the passage of time, but that was the night that the nightmares began. He had been sleeping a great deal, like a recovering patient or a very young child, as he re-acclimatized himself to living in the world.

“And I dare say being married to you has something to do with it as well,” he had offered, after Annatar shook him awake, demanding an explanation for the frequency with which he dropped into slumber. (“Tyelperinquar, what do you mean by this? It’s relatively common among males of the Edain, but those of the Eldar are not bounded by the same –”)

“It’s the way body and soul integrate their experiences,” he said, closing his eyes again and letting sleep blur the edges of his speech. “Take it as a compliment; you are exhausting.” He curled against him and let himself slip back down into sleep, the warmth of Annatar’s body and of Annatar’s pleasure at his words mapped out against his back in patterns of variable intensity, which began to shift and transform in the imaginary spaces of his dreams.

It was not actually his own screaming that woke him, but Annatar, wrapping his own awareness around his mind until it returned to the waking world: the quiet night-winds through the ancient trees, the distant noises of nocturnal creatures at their own pursuits, the fallen leaves yielding their form and returning to soil.

Neither of them said anything, nor slept again that night.

 

It did not seem that discussion of the nightmares was going to be a productive avenue of inquiry, and so they both avoided it as they walked onward through the forest. They spoke of the mineral qualities of the soil, of irrigation and the uses of forestry in flood management, of phytogeography and taxonomy and comparative linguistics.

“You do that deliberately,” Celebrimbor said, of Annatar’s habit of shifting into Valarin at moments of particular intimacy.

Annatar stretched. “Consider it encouragement to expand your linguistic understanding. I do know you enjoy a challenge.”

“Expand my – how am I supposed to learn anything if I can’t even repeat what you’re saying to me without you dissolving into laughter? All right; answer me a simple question: how can I say _I love you?_ ”

Simple as the question may have been, Annatar’s reaction was, as he had predicted, to laugh at him. Then he sobered, and his eyes took on the distant look that Celebrimbor had seen in the Brotherhood’s journeymen passing their examinations in higher mathematics, the look of someone tabulating enormous quantities.

“All right. Well, that depends on what you mean by _I,_ what you mean by _you,_ and in what sense you’re choosing to express _love –”_

“Oh, you’re going to be difficult, are you?”

“I was not the one,” said Annatar with great formality, “who asked the question; I am merely honoring your request for an answer. The problem you have posed is one of combinatorics; an initial icosian analysis suggests the following patterns.” A series of triangular permutations flashed across his consciousness, distractingly beautiful, which he suspected was Annatar’s intention. “If you’re looking for a numerical answer,” he went on, “a six followed by thirteen places, although of those only maybe a few hundred thousand would be remotely applicable to your situation –”

“Thirteen places – how many words does Valarin _have?_ ”

“Which question do you want me to answer? I am happy to address it, but given that words in the language of the Powers are a function of the world as it exists at a given moment, the answer is going to be a mathematical discipline rather than a number –”

“I won’t be put off so easily, and you know it. Come, Annatar, how –” He paused and considered the framing of the question carefully. “How would you say it to me? And how would you want me to say it to you?”

The question sank in; he watched as the smugness slipped from Annatar’s face. He was silent for so long that Celebrimbor began to wonder if he intended to answer the question at all. Then, quiet and precise, he pronounced two glittering sentences, one familiar and one not.

“ _Ðæyez amanûĝir_ ,” Celebrimbor repeated carefully. “ _Ensi ðæyez iširrûchamne..._ ”  

Annatar actually flushed. The faint rise in color was surely deliberate – everything about him was, to a greater or lesser degree, but it was gratifying nonetheless. Celebrimbor had seen that reaction in him only once before, and that had also been at a word: _mine._

He turned the sentences over in his mind, breaking them down into their component syllables and reassembling them. There was at least one element common to both sentences; with time and dedication -

He looked over at Annatar and suddenly realized that even behind the veil of the unknown language, he was as exposed as he had ever seen him.

He was having difficulty, not merely being difficult, and Celebrimbor felt him reaching toward him and pulling away: with a love of being seen and a horror of being exposed; pleased to dazzle, ill at ease to simply appear; glad to bestow gifts, and very nearly incapable of asking for them.

“You know I’m not just solving puzzles,” he said in a low voice. “I do want – the question of _who we are to each other_ may not be the only question in the world, but it is the first one.”

“ _Ðæyez,_ ” said Annatar after a moment. “Second person exclusive; it can be translated as ‘you’, but for only one person, the way that in your language _I_ means always the speaker and nothing else. The root _manu_ can be translated _to possess, to accord with, to treasure,_ or simply _to have. Gira_ is an inverted coreferential verb marker; it applies the verb to both parties in the sentence although the ending is omitted in the case of the reverential voice, where the subject is distinguished by its absence –” He looked over at Celebrimbor to see if he were keeping up. “ _Ðæyez amanûĝir, ðæyez pharaláĝir, enne se-amallach, ðæyez."_ [3]

Celebrimbor pressed him no further, but after a moment Annatar offered one final gloss.

“The root _ašru_ actually has almost an exact equivalent in your language: _to give._ ”

 

The bad moments were growing rarer, but they were not gone. He reached out to touch one bare shoulder, but drew back. “You’re shaking.”

“Yes, I noticed,” said Celebrimbor through his teeth.

“I can – go away. Do you want me to go away?”

Celebrimbor shook his head shortly, his eyes closed, his breath choppy and harsh. Speech seemed to be temporarily beyond him.  Annatar sat back on his knees and waited. He did not think it prudent to reach out for his mind any more than for his body, but he could not help but feel the black terror closing his throat and numbing his fingers any more than he could help knowing that this time he was its origin and cause.

It went on for a long time.

“It’s not the same body, though,” he put to him, when the worst of it seemed to have passed off. “It’s never known what you’re recalling in it. The nightmares at least make _sense,_ but I thought this body was made new.”

“Made for the same self, Annatar,” Celebrimbor answered, weariness roughening his voice, “that’s what it means to be incarnate. It’s more than just what I wear, it’s who I am, it’s how I experience the world. I know it’s different for you of the Ainur,” he added, “I’m only now coming to understand just how different. My aunt – and she was a Maia’s pupil – once said to me that the Ainur were less complex than we are, but at the time I didn’t understand just what – what power there is in that. Power, yes, and terror as well... For you, the will leads and all else follows; a decision once taken alters your being, an insight once accepted alters your relation to the world. For us?” He made a breathless sound that was almost a laugh. “It’s… well, more of a muddle.”

It was as if he were holding up a lantern to light the way out, illuminating a path of conversation that would lead them away from the dark tangle of memory and into a disquisition on the nature of the Ainur. Annatar did not take the offered escape.

“Even at the worst,” he said quietly, “you were never afraid of me.”

“No,” said Celebrimbor after a moment, “no, I don’t suppose I was.”

“Why are you afraid now?”

“I’m _not._ ” He realized that Annatar, even if he refrained from calling attention to the obvious contradiction, was accounting this mere pride or protestation, so he went on. “Not in the sense of fear as a judgement, anyway; I don’t… don’t dread you or abhor you or however you want to phrase it, but I am living in a body to which you mean a number of vivid and contradictory things. It doesn’t actually take that much torture before you learn what to be afraid of... Annatar, you’ve seen this before; you know exactly what this is.”

“I have seen this. In _prisoners_.” The reproach was implicit, but the distress was clear.

“I understand,” he said tightly, “you might not have taken a personal interest in the long-term potential for recovery among those who’ve suffered violence against the will. But you remember our colleagues who survived Angband, you looked them in the face and spoke to them kindly and I even think you cared about them, with the usual array of caveats that carries, with you… And if you knew what was happening with them, then you know what is happening with me; my case is not new or revelatory or even particularly _difficult._

“A little pain, a little sorrow – a body made new, without its old hurts graven into muscle and bone? Do you know how much easier I have it than Noroth did? Than Veanne? Than my uncle, whom I believe you may have met at some point? Do you know how lightly I got off, compared to them?”

Something deeply uncomfortable happened to the world, as if, once again, a lens had been adjusted. It was suddenly cold and clear and crowded. _If you knew what was happening with them, you know what’s happening with me._

The captives in Tol-in-Gauroth’s dungeons. The thralls trading their selves away piece by piece in the iron cells of Angband. The disciplined slave-camps of the mountains of the North, the armies of the East. _That wasn’t him,_ something protested, weak as an apprentice out of arguments or a prisoner reduced to pleading. He paid it no mind. The sickness swelled; it was not sickness but sight. _If you knew, then you know._

 

The nightmares, though, had not abated, and Annatar began to see their consequences even in the day: a weariness in his companion as they walked, a dullness and tarnish in the bright mind deprived of rest.

The moon was a high half-circle overhead, the ground was black and silver with light and shadow, and when Celebrimbor stumbled over a root, he signalled to Annatar to stop.  He found a dry hollow at the base of one of the trees, and sat down, his face worn and drawn in the thin light.

“I showed you my dreams before, back in Eregion; do you remember?”

The question must have been rhetorical; Annatar had made no secret of how pleasant he found watching Celebrimbor’s dreams, attempting to decipher his private language of impossible geometries and strange shifting shapes as his colleague turned some particularly difficult problem over to the unfettered imagination.

“Will you dream with me again? I don’t know, we’ll have to experiment, but knowing you’re there with me – it may help. I may not lose myself so badly.”

Relief suffused him, relief at being asked for something. He sat down beside him, and drew him into his arms. Celebrimbor rested his head on his shoulder, just as he used to do in the workshop, and Annatar ran his fingers idly through his hair as his mind opened up and welcomed him in.

Celebrimbor sank into sleep almost immediately, and the dreams began. Annatar had not anticipated the comfort and release of that sight: the strange, familiar shapes appearing again in his thought, the beautiful and restful patterns rippling outwards into a sea of silver-gold light. He tightened his arms around him, and Celebrimbor sighed. Somewhere in those half-unconscious depths, he did perceive Annatar’s presence, and it seemed to bring him ease.

Annatar did not move again; he hardly breathed as the slow dance unfolded, on and on. Once he had studied to decipher that private array of symbol and pattern, but Celebrimbor’s soul was now as close to him as his own, and the meaning was shared between them. _The renewed demands of the body_ met and combined with _impatience_ and _uncertainty_ ; all were mapped out across a grid made of _the taste of water_ and _airborne ash –_

Something was shifting in the patterns; the math had turned distressing. Lines snapped, sequences faltered, spaces crumpled and vanished. The body in his arms went tense. Celebrimbor murmured in his throat, his hands sought purchase on the air, his dreams were now darkness split by memory as by flashes of lightning. Steel parting skin, his voice choked in his throat, the clamor of a conquering army -

The terror and pain were his now as well, but worse than that, overlayed on the fragments of Celebrimbor’s memory and slotting against them to make a whole, were the other halves of the moments he recalled. The knife hot and slippery in his hand, the pulse in the neck beneath his fingers, the wide and thrilling sense of forcing his will out through thousands of armed hands and armored bodies. Somewhere the screaming was beginning again, but whether in the past or the present he did not know and could not see the use in ascertaining.

He kept very still, repressing the desire to recoil. The minds of the incarnates were comparatively simple, and Celebrimbor’s lay open to him entirely. He knew their mechanisms; it was delicate but not really difficult work to calm those parts of the mind that were struggling and crying out, to lay dark sleep across the senses that were scrawling old suffering over the new self.

The effect was immediate. Celebrimbor’s body relaxed against him, his breathing evening out. There were no more nightmares that night, and no more dreams, and when Celebrimbor felt the sun on his face and stirred once more to waking, he remembered nothing but the silence and the peace.

 

He did not even take note of the change for several days, as they walked on through the forest, though the relief from the nightmares was evident in his face. They talked of optics and of post-Endorean geometry, of Greater Working in metal and in stone and light, but Celebrimbor’s former impatience seemed to be diminished; he did not complain of the lack of experimental materials or cast about for something to sketch with. He slept, if anything, more than before, often until the sun was well in the sky,

“There’s something wrong,” he said one afternoon, slumped in lassitude at the foot of an ironwood. “I shouldn’t be this tired; I’m _not_ tired, but I feel as if I were. It’s like I’m drinking, but still I thirst – and not in the poured-out-and-ever-replenished way either,” he added, “more like the opposite of that.”

He leaned his head back against the tree-trunk, his face hot and dry, taking stock. Annatar watched him thoughtfully, but without real anxiety, content to observe the movements of his eyes beneath the lids, the motion of his throat.

“I haven’t been _dreaming_ ,” he said suddenly. “Annatar – what did you _do?_ ”

Annatar started to tell him exactly what he had done, but Celebrimbor was already pulling to pieces the wards and dampers that he had put into place. They were perfectly evident once he knew what to look for.

“You wanted comfort,” Annatar said. “You were suffering; I put a stop to it.”

“And you didn’t consider _asking_ me before just – just shutting off bits of my mind like so many valves?” He was really angry, and worse, afraid, cutting through the strong peace that still clung to his mind like shreds of spiderweb.

“I thought that you were the one doing the asking,” he said stiffly. “You had a problem, which I addressed. Tyelpe, this is something I can do for you, something I can really _do_ , beyond this business of being here or not being here, because you still have not given any kind of clear direction on what it is that will make you _stop suffering!”_

Conflict rippled back and forth between them, anger one way and hurt the other, thick and choking, until neither could tell whose it was. Celebrimbor hissed in frustration and  ran his hands backward through his hair. “All right,” he said, his voice much steadier than his thought, “here is a clear direction; if you want to live in the world, to live with me, you have to understand this. You can’t just erase the things that hurt. If I wanted _peace_ I would still be dead.”

It was easier to know the right places to touch than the right things to say, and surely the truth was redundant now that he stood exposed before him, in all ways and everywhere. He offered it nonetheless, experimentally.

“I am… sorry.”

The experiment was successful; the brittle lattices of anger and fear melted and ran together. Celebrimbor sighed. “If I do want relief, I – I will tell you. At times, perhaps, if the dreams are too much to bear; you could do that for me, for a while. But you know what dreaming is to me; I need it to bring my experiences and understanding into harmony, and, well, there are a lot of experiences, between one thing and another…”

He looked up at Annatar, his eyes soft with memory. “I dreamed of the touch of your hand on mine, you know; from the moment I saw you.”

“What?” Annatar seated himself beside him. “I saw your dreams. You dreamed of strong light on fractals.”

He smiled, a rueful smile that turned down at the edges. “What I said.” He reached out an arm and pulled Annatar to him.  “Sleep with me.”

The look that Annatar gave him must have been particularly easy to read, for he laughed aloud and gripped him closer. “No, I don’t mean that like the Edain do – why would anyone want to be asleep for that?! I mean actually sleeping – you _can_ , after all, even if you don’t need to. You don’t need to watch or to ward me; we’ll sleep together. Perhaps you’ll see what it is to me then. Or perhaps you won’t,” he added, “in fairness. But make the experiment.”

“Oh well,” said Annatar, with aggressive tranquility, “if I can follow you into Ulmo’s realm I suppose I can follow you into Irmo’s. You give me strange commands, my lordly one.”

“Command nothing.” Celebrimbor was easing himself down flat on the thick moss. “Suggestion. Request. Something for you to do.”

Annatar laid his head down on his chest.

The last time he had truly slept was sometime at the very end of the First Age. Bereft of his lord and at the end of his strength, it had been a choice between shedding his battered shape altogether or crawling into a bolthole like a beast and abandoning the waking world. He remembered how to do it now; sleep was a simple enough physical mechanism, though the spiritual untethering – casting himself loose – was unpleasantly reminiscent of how it had felt to die.

When his own dreams came, it was in no way a surprise to find himself back in Eregion; that was pure memory. Only now, the anger and exhilaration, the power and solace of the Ring, were all overlaid with the choking knowledge _this leads nowhere, there is nothing for you here._

Sauron railed and argued and cajoled; Celebrimbor wept and bled and spat defiance; Annatar pushed against the walls of the dream. _What do you mean by this, Lorien?_ _Have I not seen this a hundred times, in my memory and in his? What more is there to be learned here?_

Perhaps it was not all memory. It was easier than he had remembered it being. And surely he had never -

_Out of curiosity, Tyelperinquar, do you really think there are lines I will not cross?_

Sharp delicate goldsmithing tools on the table. Thin white clouds across the gray winter sky. The war banners of the Black Hand fluttering and snapping in the courtyard of the Mírdain.

_That there are things that matter more to me than this?_

He was loosening the bindings around one burned wrist. The army at his back was raising the victory-shout. That was not a banner there, planted among the standards in the courtyard. He could not wake up. He could not remember how to awaken. Black and cold as the sea, pulling him down like a great wave, the dream closed over him.

_Your people like to speak of the eyes as showing the soul, but I think it’s in your hands that I see yours._

The sun was low in the sky, the leaves orange and gold with sunset, when Celebrimbor awakened, really refreshed for the first time in days. He stirred. They had changed positions as they slept; he had fallen into slumber with his arm flung over Annatar’s shoulders, and his weight heavy and comforting on his chest. Now Annatar was curled around him, weeping silently, clutching his hands in his.

Alarmed, Celebrimbor turned himself to face him, reaching to touch his face. “Annatar? What on earth -?”

“There will be no need to repeat the experiment.” His mind was snapped shut, offering neither hostility nor any purchase for the unusually gentle touch of the other spirit against his own, and Celebrimbor did not press him.

They walked together in silence through the rest of the evening and into night, until, as morning came, Celebrimbor suddenly clasped his hand in his, and held it against his chest. A brief bright flash of fear flared and faded: the memory of the splitting of the bone.

“Look at the two of us! I suppose I should have listened to Mandos about recovery taking time, but I needed to find you; I came as soon as I could.” He laughed, a quiet bittersweet sound. “I’m almost sorry I didn’t have to go on a world-altering quest to retrieve your scattered spirit; sometimes I think that would be easier and more dignified than this.”

“Well, presumably this would still have to happen,” Annatar offered, with infuriating practicality. “Though I do appreciate the sentiment.”

“What… what was it that happened to you?”

Annatar looked at him curiously. “You saw it, didn’t you? Pried open my mind like an oyster-shell not thirty seconds after you stepped out of Mandos?”

“Saw – well, I suppose that’s _a_ word for it!” That space in Annatar’s memory was more dreadful than even the horrors of the First Age: that space between the dissolution of death and the return to life. “But I think I might understand more if you can say something about it; there are some things that not even I can look at straight on.”

Annatar was silent for a long time while they walked on; the full, working silence of a hydraulic system coming to temperature and pressure.

“When we who chose Eä were translated into it – before time was a concept with meaning – there were certain things that we lost. There are always are, in translation. Your mathematicians have partially gotten at it: you cannot see any system whole from within the system itself; you cannot utter every truth in one language.”

If this was an answer to Celebrimbor’s question, it was not immediately evident. Accordingly, he kept waiting. There was another long complex silence, and when Annatar did not seem inclined to break it, he began.

“You said to me once – although, now I think about it, I don’t suppose it was to me at all – that the One took the same approach to Eä that the Valar did to Middle-Earth. What was your phrase, ‘took one look at it and decided it was someone else’s problem’?”

“I would not say that now.”

“What would you say?”

“I.... don’t know.” He spoke slowly, as if the words tasted strange in his mouth. “I don’t know.”

“So you saw… well, the One?”

“Sight,” said Annatar with both confidence and fervor, “is not the word. Come to think of it, neither is ‘you’; there was no self.”

“We are not getting anywhere with this conversation if you’re just going to _unask_ every question I put to you –” It was his turn for a working silence. “All right, _taking as metaphor_ both the idea of speech and your existence as a referent – Annatar, what did the One say to you?”

“My name.”

There was neither pause nor qualification in his answer. Celebrimbor took his hand and twined his fingers through his.

“What _is_ your name?” he asked after some time had passed and the last reverberations of that answer had died away. “I pledged marriage to you by my name and yours; it just now occurs to me, I don’t know what that actually is-”

“Carrying on the proud family tradition, I see,” said Annatar, now all infuriating innocence, “of binding yourself irrevocably by things you cannot understand.”

“Oh can’t I, _Sauron?_ ” he retorted. “I can think of nearly half a dozen names you’ve gone by, but I can’t imagine you’d want to acknowledge half of them. And of course you wouldn’t _have_ a father-name…”

Annatar laughed, but his answer was serious. “My old master called me by the first name that I was given. In your language that would be _Mairon_.”

 _“Mairon?_ As in ‘The King in the East, Tar-Mairon the Excellent, Ring-Maker and Ring-Giver’ and whatever other titles you added onto that?”

Annatar tossed his head, but Celebrimbor found himself curiously moved at the thought that he had kept one name from his days as Aulë’s servant to those as the tyrant of the lands beyond the White Mountains. He did not press him as to which _old master_ he was referring; he suspected he knew the answer. “That’s from _maira,_ isn’t it? It… suits you.”

He brought his hand to his lips. “But to me, at least, you have always been Annatar. You gave me that name once when I asked. Will you take that name from me now?”

“How should I not,” said Annatar, “when it is in your voice I hear it?”

“ _Lord of gifts…_ ”said Celebrimbor, “and so you are to me.”

“Received, now, perhaps,” said Annatar, not looking at him, “as well as given.”

“But what is your true name, the one that Iluvatar spoke to you before he sent you back?”

Celebrimbor half expect Annatar to simply refuse the question, but instead he considered it. “I cannot say it; I cannot do anything other than say it. That name – it _was_ the sending back. That name is my existence in the world.”

“I am glad of it. Annatar, I chose you above the world that I love and because of the world that I love and ever since I walked out of Mandos I have been trying to understand what that means for us, since your suggestion that we sit in the trees singing like wood-thrushes until the end of Arda still doesn’t seem quite satisfactory –”

There was a half-suppressed sound from Annatar; a laugh being turned into an implausible sneeze.

“But that’s it, right there: the words for what I want. _A world that is better for your existence_.”

“Well,” said Annatar tartly, “apparently the Creator of the Universe shares your aspirations, which frankly I think speaks well for his judgement.”

Celebrimbor burst out laughing. “I can’t tell if you’re making wildly inflated claims about yourself or about me, but if you’re attempting to make the One rethink that evaluation of you, I object.”

They walked on together. “I probably should have asked this a while ago, but what were the… the terms of your release in Aman? I saw the Valar in judgement, and, well, here you are, but…”

“Even Melkor was held some time in Námo’s hospitality, you mean? No, Námo wanted nothing to do with me. He put up enough fuss about me simply waiting on his doorstep. And as for release… None of them were happy about issuing judgement in my case. Indeed, they do not seem to be entirely certain whether I am under their authority at all.”

“Why, whose authority do they believe you under?”

Annatar held his gaze for what would have been, from anyone else, an uncomfortably long time.

“What? You can’t mean – they cannot possibly – and you only thought to mention this _now_? I took you as a husband, not a hostage!”

Annatar shrugged, clearly less perturbed by the arrangement than Celebrimbor. “Are you surprised that they left up to you matters which they were unwilling and unable to deal with themselves? Is that in any way inconsistent with the history of Arda even as you know it?”

Celebrimbor burst into helpless laughter, rocking forward with his hands on his knees. “So I’m walking through the Blessed Realm as surety that you won’t – oh, I don’t know, insinuate yourself into some unguarded empire and wind up at the head of conquering legions?”

“That’s not an inaccurate description,” Annatar pointed out, “from certain perspectives anyway.”

“I would like to have _words_ with the Elder King about this –” he began, and “ _Don’t-_ ” said Annatar simultaneously, but there was already a stir of wings in the branches above. Even with his expanded powers of perception, Celebrimbor did not know whether what he saw was a storm of birds or a tangle of cloud, but it was descending rapidly and unfolding into the shape of a man. Half as tall as the trees, with a face like summer and eyes like the unclouded sky, robed in blue and white, he looked upon them and even the tower-high trees swayed, as if in a high wind.

“ _You,_ ” said Annatar unhappily.

“You summoned me,” said Manwë, “and I am here.”

This was not what Celebrimbor would have considered to constitute a summons, though he decided that now was not the time to protest the matter. He bowed to the King of Arda as courteously as if he were the Lord of Eregion, and not the Master of the Mírdain, nor even the last scion of Fëanor’s rebellious house, although privately he felt, for the first time since leaving Mandos, acutely underdressed.

“In truth,” said Manwë, and his voice was gentle as the wind rippling the long grass over the plains, “I have long desired this meeting, but Námo would not have it while your spirit sheltered in his halls. But you have never been far from my thoughts, nor out of my eye.”

Annatar successfully but visibly suppressed another objection. Manwë was untroubled, gazing upon them both with deep affection. “You have brought us good news from a far country; you have made substance of our Hope: that what has been lost may be returned in truth. I greet you from my heart. Aiya Curufinwë Tyelperinquar Antulien Turainon!” He made a complex, sweeping gesture with his hand; the currents of air that followed it tracing invisible sigils around them.

 _“Returned –”_ Celebrimbor was parsing the cascade of address. “ _Master of... holy..._ _god-conqueror?!_ You can’t mean – excuse me, Highest, but –”

He looked helplessly at his companion, but Annatar was nodding. “That seems accurate enough.”

“Your deeds are a new song among your people beyond the Sea,” said the Lord of the Valar, “and have been added to the oldest song among mine at the foot of the Holy Mountain. But I have come to speak with you, and what I ask, I ask for myself as well as for the world that is my charge.” His voice grew low and serious, cold wind over high stone. “Do you believe that what you have done can be… replicated?”

There was a brief tangled movement, as both Celebrimbor and Annatar independently and simultaneously worked out the implications of his question and each moved to step in front of the other.

“You cannot possibly mean to ask –”

“Not for you, Elder King –”

Annatar was shining with a dangerous light that Celebrimbor had not seen since their return to the world. “He is not yours, you cannot _use_ him as if he were some sort of instrument-”

“Peace, Annatar, you need not fear for your lord. He has done enough. I will not ask him to recall my lost brother from the depths into which he has cast himself. There is no bond, after all, that links him to your old master –”

“No.” Celebrimbor sensed the direction of Manwë’s intent better, he thought, than did Annatar. “Lord of the Breath of Arda, you will not ask this of him. _God-conqueror_ you named me just a moment ago; I may not have a glorious record of _survival_ in my struggle with the Ainur but I will prove that name again if you try to take him from me.”

Manwë looked from one to the other of them and held out his hands. “Peace, little brothers, peace! You bristle like cats backed into a corner. I am no Tulkas, my judgement is not his; there will be no fighting now.”

He looked at Celebrimbor and his sky-colored eyes darkened, from summer noon to dusk. “I understand. Such a deed cannot be asked of any other. It can only be offered.”

“You speak of this – of Annatar’s return – as if it was something that _I did,_ ” said Celebrimbor with some difficulty “yes, you too, Annatar. But it wasn’t. What _I_ did was launch myself headfirst into a painful and pointless death while casting aside all but the barest considerations of safety for the world that I had loved and cherished and tried to bring some measure of light. Lord of Arda, is that what you propose to cast aside for the sake of your world-marring brother?”

His voice grew quiet and sad. “When you ask me about what I did, you are asking the wrong question.” The wind around them died altogether. “What I did was meaningless without what _you did_ , Annatar. Choosing to cast aside all that you had ever made or done or been, for the sake of –”

“Hope,” said Manwë.

“ _Ðæyez,_ ” said Annatar at the same moment.

The three of them looked at each other. Manwë’s eyes were midnight now, and overcast. “You speak in wisdom. I hold the office that I was given; I know what I cannot cast aside. But I am glad that, for you at least, there might be reconciliation.” He gathered his robes into himself, his form beginning to fade like high clouds. “You have chosen, both of you alike… You did not choose the world, but it is yours nonetheless, and I wish you all joy of it, when you return.”

Even after the Elder King had shed his form altogether, the two remained staring at the place where he had been.

“That is a specimen of Manwë’s courtesy,” said Annatar, “or perhaps of his analytical capabilities, to offer his imprimatur on what we are already doing anyway, with or without his help.” But his hand in Celebrimbor’s was cold; the encounter had at some level left him shaken.

“Why, what are we doing?”

“Well, _I_ am returning to the world,” said Annatar, “and as it is your lead I am following, by inference –”

Celebrimbor laughed and brought his hand to his lips. “Homeward, then, beloved?”

This time the Valarin words were clear and simple enough that he understood them at once. “ _Thou art my home, my shining one. But onward. To the world. Yes, with thee._ ”

“I didn’t think – of course you don’t exactly have a place to go – we’ll start with my family then; make for their estate. I suppose I ought to introduce you to my mother.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1: Aule is using the most distant pronoun Valarin has, indicating something to which the speaker has no relation.  
> 2: This being the second person exclusive, which can no more be used of more than one individual than 'I' can.  
> 3: This is partly a language exercise, partly an attempt at distracting Celebrimbor, and partly a completely wholehearted expression of endearment: "I [mutually possess/treasure/accord with] you; I [am mutually illuminated/kindled by/pass through] you; incline yourself toward me, beloved."


	3. Three

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Celebrimbor and Sauron meet each other's families.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is, hands down, the most difficult thing I've ever written. Writing things going, by and large, _well_ , proved to be intensely difficult, and the number of people who wished to express their opinions of Sauron running around loose was frankly daunting. My thanks to Sumeria, who held a: my hand, and b: my feet to the fire, as warranted.

“You _are_ nervous,” Annatar said, with an air of satisfaction, as if he had succeeded in isolating an expected but elusive element from amalgamated material.

“Annatar, we share one life and heart and my soul is to you as your own, or something along those lines” snapped Celebrimbor, “it’s hardly a great feat for you to notice if I’m nervous.”

Annatar laughed. “Well yes, but it’s not your soul that gives you away. You go quiet when you’re nervous about something, and you look angry.” The look that Celebrimbor shot him must have been exactly the sort he had in mind, for he laughed again. “When you’re actually angry, of course, you look cheerful.

“Some,” he added, after a minute, seeing that Celebrimbor made no response, “might say that you aren’t the one of us who would be expected to be nervous under these circumstances.”

Even this failed to draw him. Like someone trying to carry a heavy, shifting weight, Celebrimbor was adjusting himself under the contradictory demands of his situation. He had not seen his family for more than an age of the world, and though he had no inclination to deny or conceal his choices, this balanced uneasily against the burden that he would be placing upon his family by returning accompanied as he was. Celebrimbor rarely flinched from anything, but a faint, weary, sour desire surged in him: to have the next few hours done with.

Annatar had, in his own estimation, grown more patient with the inconsistencies and self-contradictions in the minds of the Incarnates. That one who had not trembled to face a god in his wrath should be daunted by the prospect of seeing his mother again was absurd, but it was a beloved absurdity. He looked at Celebrimbor with deep affection.

Suddenly Celebrimbor burst out laughing - real laughter, not the thin sharp sounds of chosen cheer. “Are you honestly congratulating yourself on your tolerance and understanding? _One_ of us was nervous enough about coming home that he got himself a new name, new face, and an empire rather than do it… Come, Annatar Aulëndil, it’s not much further now. We’ll be absurd together.”

 

“Who is this one?” Laicanis asked. She leaned back on her elbows in the thick bright grass, studying the stone figure emerging from the pillar.  

“Two people really. Calie and Culine were the models,” said Nerdanel, her red hair gray with stone dust, as she dug her fingers into the muscles of her forearm to relieve the ache from the repeated blows of chisel on stone. “You met them, I think.”

“Oh, those healers from Valmar? Yes, I remember them.” Laicanis did not spend all of her time at her mother-in-law’s halls, the thriving complex that had been the Fëanorian summer estates in the days before the quarrel that had splintered the House of Finwë. More often she was teaching mathematical metatheory at the scholars’ halls in Tirion and Eressea, and occasionally in the monasteries of the _Notenduri_ [1]. But Nerdanel’s halls still felt like home to her. She had found them a harbor and a haven when she had returned alone from the Halls of the Dead, and now, she thought, it was likely her son would seek them out as well. His grandmother, after all, was the only living family member of whom he could be reasonably expected to know the location.

It had been nearly a month since Laicanis had felt the world change: a gentle, definitive rearrangement like the blossoming of sweet-scented trees, or the cutting of hair, or the final easing of an old and faded pain. Her son was in the world again, her son whom she had not seen since her death on a night of battle and storm before the first rising of the Moon.

“I had been meaning to ask you,” Laicanis said. “I have hardly any of the Sight compared to you, but blood does count for something, even across death and the long years, and I have been wondering.... Tyelperinquar. Does it seem to you that he is — not alone?”

Nerdanel considered. Her head moved in a quick half-gesture of negation. “He is not alone,” she said to herself, “and he is not the same…” It was hardly possible that he should be, after all. Her grandson had been hardly out of boyhood when she had last seen him, just beginning to grow into strength to match his long limbs.

“I cannot account for it,” said Laicanis. “I might have said that he is married now, but I’ve heard no songs that speak of a spouse, nor indeed of any his heart had chosen. Or I might guess it’s the greatness of his deeds that hangs about him, but the thought will not leave my mind: he is not alone.”

She shrugged slightly, content to leave the question to its empirical resolution if Nerdanel could provide no further insight. “But I’ve finished the gift-theorem I am making for him, anyway. A small addition to the field of functional analysis, to welcome him home. Linear transformation always brought him pleasure, for all that he was seldom content to sit and study. He had to be always at work with his hands upon something. He was like his father that way,” she added after a moment. “Like you.”

Nerdanel was still concentrating, her mind focused on the approaching, un-solitary figure of her grandson. “Not the same,” she said again to herself, “and not alone… Within the day, and before Ambarussa return from their hunting in the south, he will be here. Or, well, _they_ will, and Tyelperinquar can tell us himself who he’s brought with him from the Halls of the Dead.”

 

Celebrimbor, indeed, was not the same on the evening that he came back to his grandmother’s halls, nor was he alone. The news had scarcely moments to precede them into the hall, and no time at all for the runner to explain herself beyond “They’re here, they’re here —” before Laicanis looked up to see two gray-clad figures just outside the hall.

The entrance was a wide stone archway, but the two figures seemed to fill the whole space: her son like a king, and his companion beside him like a god. It was as if they shone without light, or perhaps resounded without sound, like two frequencies integrated into a single function. Beside her Nerdanel sprang from her seat.

“Curufinwë —”

Laicanis looked up from her papers and let herself smile.

“Tyelperinquar.”

At first it seemed that her son meant to conduct their reunion with all the solemnity befitting legend, stepping over the threshold with measured pace, and sinking to one knee before her like a subject or a supplicant. But he glanced up, and met her eyes, and all at once sprang to his feet, scooping her bodily into his arms.   He was laughing and weeping together, and she buried her face in his hair.

“You took your time about getting here,” Laicanis said tartly, after a while, because words were unfit for anything else that there was to be said.

He set her down, and she studied him, trying to account for the strangeness about him. There was nothing of childhood left in him now, though she could see clearly the child she had known. He was unscarred and shining as any of those who returned from the dead, and like them he carried the darkness of Mandos under every glance and gesture. He smelled of the outdoors, of the wind and water of Aman, and about his hair hung the lightning-strike smell of the presence of the Ainur.

She would have said, at first, that he was taller, but that was an easy carelessness of Quenya, to conflate exaltation of the person with elevation of the body. He was higher, loftier, _more_ than he had been, and he carried power with him as clearly as an artist or a king.

“What happened to you?” she asked him.

“Quite a lot,” Celebrimbor replied with studied ease, and then he grinned at her. They had once amused themselves, as large families will, in tracing familial traits from one face to another. _Those are grandsire Finwë’s shoulders, Nerdanel’s laughter, Miriel’s own temper. Do you think those are his father’s eyes, or his mother’s?_ Celebrimbor’s smile, though, was all his own: a quick guarded flicker blossoming smoothly into open, contagious delight.

“And at some point along the way you began consorting with one of the Holy Ones,” added Nerdanel. She had stood back to let them have their reunion, but she had not missed the figure still waiting in the doorway. Indeed, he could not be missed; he shone like fire made flesh, and the world pulled toward him like a net suddenly entangled with some mighty creature of the depths. It was not immediately obvious to which of the Valar this Maia answered, but he was clearly mighty among his kind. Silent song resounded from him; the members of the household who were still in the hall had shrunk back against the wall in wonder and terror.

Laicanis rubbed at her temples, spanning her forehead and shading her eyes. “You don’t _have_ to do that, you know,” she said to the figure in the doorway.

“Do what?” He turned upon her a look of such primal and concentrated innocence that she knew at once he was perfectly aware of his effect.

“The…” She could not immediately find the word, instead making a vague hand gesture intended to communicate _radiance._

“It only means he’s trying to impress you,” put in Celebrimbor. “He did the same thing when he turned up on my doorstep.”

“Yes, well, it makes it hard to think. I’m very impressed but please turn it down.”

“I begin to see where you get it from,” said the stranger to Celebrimbor.

“If you hear a voice whispering to you in your heart of hearts,” added Celebrimbor, who appeared to be enjoying himself, “offering you all that you have dreamed or desired, that’s also him; ignore it.”

The Maia actually glared at him — a gesture too earthly to be anything but deliberate — but he did honor her request. The world was already resuming its normal orientation and the unseen brilliance was no longer quite as blinding. As Nerdanel came up to embrace her grandson, Laicanis studied his companion: the fiery eyes, the silver-gold hair, an overwhelming beauty of person assumed so casually it was almost insulting, as if a king’s robe had been thrown on for a bath-towel. The statue-like perfection was something she had seen before in the forms that the Ainur took for themselves, but looking at him she also had a brief and unsettling impression that she was looking at her son, or perhaps at something he had made.

There was a quiet, merry sound, and she looked to see Nerdanel laughing to herself beside Celebrimbor, surveying their strange guest from over his shoulder. “Well, this not the first time one of the lesser gods has followed one of my family home,” she said. “The last time I put down a bowl of scraps beside the fire for him, which I’m happy to do for you if you’d like, my lord Ainu. Still, I suspect this husband of yours might object.”

“Yes, about that,” said Celebrimbor and Laicanis, at the same time and with very nearly the same intonation, which momentarily diverted both of them from their purpose with laughter. The presence in the doorway flickered. Laicanis wondered briefly if that was his way of showing laughter as well, but a very recognizable expression soon followed — one eyebrow raised at Celebrimbor. “About that,” the Maia said, and did not go on.

She reached out to touch the side of her son’s face with curiosity, and deep affection. The lines of the jaw had hardened with adulthood, but the contours were the ones that she knew from the child who had nestled in her lap as she plotted polar equations. “Yes,” she said,  “I’ve been looking forward to learning the solution to this particular puzzle since first I suspected that you were not alone in your homeward journey.  You had no sweetheart in Aman to return to, and the songs of Middle-Earth that have reached our shores don’t speak of a spouse for you. As I have cause to know, they are notorious for omitting spouses, but one of the Ainur, I think, would have made an impression.” She looked hard into her son’s eyes; union was written there, and death, and something strange that left her own eyes stinging.

“Well, I suppose they wouldn’t — wait, songs? What do you mean? The songs of Middle-Earth generally left me out as well, as I had done or suffered nothing particular and I spoiled the meter on the tally of the sons of Fëanor.”

This time the flicker in the doorway nearly reached the visible spectrum. The Maia had raised one hand to his mouth. Nerdanel was watching him with close attention.

“That’s an odd way of asking me to flatter you! _Nothing particular?!_ Or did you suppose all song had ceased with your death?” But Celebrimbor was still looking bewildered.

“Oh, my son,” Laicanis said softly, “you are a hero and a legend, and if half the things they say of you are true, then the High King himself should have been standing outside the Forest of Return, waiting to do you honor.”

“I’ve been telling him the same thing,” said the being in the doorway. “From you, perhaps, he’ll believe it.”

“Oh,” said Celebrimbor, and then “ _oh,_ ” again, as it occurred to him why he might be celebrated in song. He opened his mouth as if to speak, looked around him, and shut it again.

“You see,” said his companion.

Laicanis chanted gravely in exceedingly correct Sindarin:  
“ _O glad in peace and grim in war,_  
_Hail, falling Star of Fëanor!_  
_Who bore to earth the Lord of Night_  
_And in thy fall put dark to flight.”_

Celebrimbor looked at his companion with an expression closer to alarm than to anything else, but his husband was nodding in satisfaction. Turning back to Laicanis, he ran both hands backwards through his loose hair, a old, old gesture that caught at her heart like a flying sleeve snagged by a thorn. “So, Mother,” he said, “there are two ways that this could go! I could tell you the story from beginning to end, or you could tell me what you already know and I could correct and amend it as necessary.”

“Well, the latter would be far more amusing,” Laicanis said.

“You know that’s now a competitive event?” Nerdanel put in. “The Strife of Truth with Art is a feature of the Midsummer Festival at the Poets’ College in Tirion; you bring your own account of the story of your death and attempt to set it against the songs and legends that have sprung up around it, and you’re judged upon your ability to sway the hearts of the listeners. Many of the Amanyar feel it’s in rather poor taste, and it does tend to be a younger group participating, but should you ever feel the need to contend in song…”

The sound from the watcher in the doorway was not exactly laughter.

“Why don’t you come in, master Maia? No need to stand there like a doorpost; it doesn’t fit the hall architecture at all.”

He inclined his head in graceful, respectful acknowledgement, but his eyes did not leave Celebrimbor, and he did not move from the doorway.

“So, what I know of your fate...” said Laicanis. “Let me see. I left Mandos at the Pardon of the Noldor, so from that point on I must rely on story rather than sight -”

“I can start you off,” Nerdanel offered. “ _The leaves were gold, and white the flowers/The holly-branches sharp and bright/But fairer were the shining towers/The gems of lost Eregion…_ No, that will take all day and I haven’t the voice for it.”

“The songs paint you as a lord of some sort,” Laicanis went on, “whether a lord of a city of craftsmen or a metaphorical lord among craftsmen seems to be in some dispute. There’s reference to a Great Rebirth and a Second Noontide, and hints at some very interesting advances in chemical nomenclature, although unfortunately that’s not the primary focus of any of the surviving accounts —”

Celebrimbor shot a look at his companion in the doorway that seemed designed to preempt an interruption; certainly the aura of innocence he was projecting increased by a small but measurable amount.

“They also refer to you as the Ring-Maker. My initial theory was that you had taken up your grandfather’s study of polycyclic molecular structures, but a preponderance of the evidence seems to indicate that the title was literal, and that you had somehow fused the discipline of jewelsmithing with that of… they were never very clear on what exactly, but the words _strength, healing,_ and _blessedness_ tend to recur.”

“Is it… _just_ me they refer to as the Ring-Maker?” asked Celebrimbor guardedly.

Laicanis searched her memory. “Well, there’s ‘the Elven-smiths’, ‘the sages of Eregion’, and a line which refers to your whole school as being led by ‘Elves and Men and stranger kin’ which I gather refers to Aulë’s children—”

“And the ‘Lord of Night’,” prompted Celebrimbor’s companion. “You did say something about him.”

“This is a terrible idea,” said Celebrimbor suddenly. “I thought perhaps - no. Annatar, I’m not doing this alone. Mother, Grandmother, this is my friend, my choice, my other self; _Annatar_ to me, called _Mairon_ in the morning of the world—” The pause was not long enough to be a true hesitation; his eyes were locked with his companion’s.

“ _Sauron_ to the High-Elves and _Gorthaur_ to the Grey,” said Annatar coolly, “and _Thû_ to the peoples of Eglador. There are other names in a similar vein, from peoples still less familiar to you, but I imagine that’s sufficient to make the point.”

Laicanis was not, at first, sure what that point might be. The cascade of bitter epithets caught her by surprise. They were familiar but she could not immediately place where she had heard them before. Then she did.

“There are stories that say you defeated a _Sauron,_ ” she said slowly to her son. “The Dark Lord that you brought down in single combat. _Morgoth’s minion    in malice mighty / Sauron resurgent     rode on Eregion…_ ”

“How many songs _are_ there about this,” Celebrimbor protested. “That’s a completely different dialect -”

Laicanis looked to Nerdanel to see what she made of the news, but she had only the intense stillness she wore when listening.

“They speak truly,” said the man her son had married. “I am that _Sauron_ which Tyelperinquar brought down.”

Celebrimbor had gone quite still.

Laicanis looked from one of them to the other, and slowly took her seat again, leaving her son standing at her side.

“You fought each other,” she said, “or so the songs would have it. Celebrimbor Fëanor’s heir made a last stand in the ruins of his city against Morgoth’s oldest servant, and spent his own life in bringing him down. The details are astonishingly unclear, even given the usual allowances for exaggerations of poets and errors in transmission.

 _“There in that place of sorcery/In magic strove they mightily,_ ” she chanted softly, almost to herself. “ _But of that battle who shall tell?..._ Was it correct?” she asked, sudden and sharp, “in the major particulars? He killed you?”

Celebrimbor looked quickly to Annatar, both realizing that they did not know which of them she was addressing.

“Curufinwë —”

“Yes, I did kill him,” her son answered, and now she could hear the tightness in his voice. “Yes and no. I… I spoke with him. I persuaded him to destroy himself, and the, the consequences of that killed me as well. It is no small thing, for one of the Ainur to be unmade…” He was looking at her anxiously, to see how she bore up under the weight of such news.

“Well, I don’t understand this at all,” Laicanis said briskly, “so let’s hear your explanation. When we left Aman we were seeking revenge upon the Black Foe of the World.”

“Among other things. Yes.”

“And this is one of his servants.” It hardly seemed possible. Not that one of Morgoth’s creatures should wear so fair a face — she remembered the impeccable form that Melkor had worn when he walked free in Valinor — but that he should share so much of her son.

“Is he?” There was nothing of judgement in Nerdanel’s voice, only curiosity.  She might have been asking Laicanis’s opinion of a stone sample or a student monograph. “Morgoth is gone, and servants may change masters. Well, Annatar? Are you a servant of the one that we call Morgoth?”

“Why would a servant of Morgoth answer that truthfully?” Laicanis turned back toward her mother-in-law.

“I find it instructive to hear what people have to say for themselves,” said Nerdanel, staring thoughtfully somewhere past Annatar in the doorway.

“I left Aulë’s service for Melkor’s before your kind awakened,” Annatar said evenly. “I worked his will on Middle-Earth. But Melkor failed, and I was left masterless-”

“I hadn’t thought of it before,” broke in Celebrimbor, “but that would have been at almost the same time I was coming to Gil-Galad, wouldn’t it? After the Great War, after the world was broken and Beleriand drowned — I’m sorry, Mother, this must be just a stream of names to you.”

“Nothing I can’t keep up with,” said Laicanis dryly. “Go on.”

“So the songs apparently speak of our — er — last battle. Do any of them mention that we had known each other before that? That he was my friend?”

“Friend?” echoed Annatar. “I counted half the Mirdain my _friends;_ I am entirely certain you can find a more precise term for what I was to you.”

“Colleague? Teacher? Guest?” There was laughter in Celebrimbor’s voice now, an easing of the tension. “Emissary of Aman and messenger of the gods? You did say what you were _to me_ , after all… Or should I say co-creator, the light in my thoughts and the companion of my heart, who shared my vision and lifted me up with you —”

“This still doesn’t explain,” said Laicanis, a little more loudly than necessary — for Annatar’s presence was once again practically glowing and her son was becoming distracted — “how you came to be killing each other.”

Celebrimbor sobered at once. “Well. When Annatar came to us in the Mirdain — that’s the Brotherhood of the Jewelsmiths, my people in Eregion — he came offering knowledge and wisdom and help in our shared mission. He offered us only who he was, not who he had been.”

Annatar’s hands closed at his sides.

“I did not press him,” Celebrimbor went on. “We had all agreed to leave the past behind us.”

“I could see why you would do that,” said Laicanis.

“Eventually, he… he trusted me.” He looked up at her ruefully. “And I reacted with rather less poise than you, on learning that he had been a servant of Morgoth.”

“Tyelperinquar.”

It was not exactly unsettling, to hear the name that she had given her son spoken with such feeling in that musical voice. But once again, there was that sense of strange recognition, of the familiar blended with the utterly alien.

“If only I had confined myself to _not understanding_!” Celebrimbor said. “I rejected him; I drove him away from me. Our partnership was broken.”

“And so that’s how you ended up facing each other at swordpoint?” Nerdanel did not seem surprised; she had, perhaps, seen this transformation often enough before.

“There may,” said Annatar with unnatural evenness, “have been some overreaction on my part.”

“Not swordpoint exactly,” said Celebrimbor, electing not to comment on the degree of understatement. “I — I knew that I couldn’t defeat him in battle, not with what he’d done to himself, what he’d become. I met him vision against vision, will against will, because I believed that he could still choose to reject it.  In the end, he did.”

“So you spoke with him,” Nerdanel said. “He still had those armies, though, didn’t he? The ones he used to level your city? That does not seem like the strongest position from which to negotiate his surrender.”

It was Annatar and not Celebrimbor who answered. “He was right.”

Laicanis exhaled. “Well, frankly,” she said to her son, “that sounds a great deal more like you. Something as straightforward as a heroic last stand seemed much more in keeping with one of Nolofinwë’s line.” Her hands shifted restlessly in her lap. “No, I still don’t understand. I have all the pieces, but I can’t fit them together; they don’t all seem to belong to the same system. You loved him. You have chosen each other. He served Morgoth. You fought and killed each other.”

Annatar seemed as if he were about to object, but Laicanis forestalled him, still addressing Celebrimbor. “No, that’s not the part I’m having trouble with. I’ve killed friends myself, if it comes to that. But _servant of Morgoth…_ ” She looked up sharply. “For goodness sake, come in out of the doorway, Annatar.”

This time he did, drawing up a chair before her. Celebrimbor reached for his hand and she marked the familiar, effortless way their fingers twined and interlocked. But when she spoke, she addressed her son and not the one who had killed him.

“It is Irmo’s pleasure, or perhaps merely his nature,” she began, “to send us visions both true and false.” Annatar looked as if he had something to say on the subject; a quick pressure of Celebrimbor’s fingers evidently warned him off saying it.

“I saw you, from time to time, in my dreams.” Sometimes Celebrimbor had been a child, sometimes the youth she remembered, sometimes the man that she had seen through the unforgiving eyes of history in the Halls of the Dead. When she had returned to life, trading knowledge of the world for the ability to act within it and upon it, the Lord of Dreams had shown her many different fates that might have befallen her son. Sometimes he wore his father’s proud beauty, sometimes his grandfather’s fury-tinged inspiration, sometimes...

“The last time I saw you, you were standing alone in a darkened smithy. Cradled in your hands you held an ember, and you were breathing upon it, coaxing it to flame.”

She had marked the change in Annatar's presence as she spoke of true and false dreams; nothing altered on his face but something in the quality of his being grew sharp and watchful. She went on.

“The ember kindled. The light in your hands grew and grew, searing, blinding, until I could see nothing at all. Then I woke, and knew that you were dead.”

She had not remembered falling asleep, but she remembered that waking, cold and open-eyed, the starlight on the papers at her desk, that knowledge lodged in her too deep for removal or relief. It had been weeks before she could weep.

“Mother-” Celebrimbor was reaching his free hand toward her; she took it in both of hers.

“You are not so changed, my child, as to have lost your love of creation. Morgoth did not create: he stole, plundered, twisted, and destroyed. You say that you spoke to this one, your Annatar, you persuaded him, and I can well believe it. But what I cannot understand —”

“Why he found that worth doing in the first place?” asked Annatar.

“Precisely.” Laicanis gave him a curt nod of approval.

Celebrimbor was silent between them. She could see him marshalling his thoughts. “The art that arose between us,” he began, and then, jarred by the artifice of his own speech, began again with “All that we made together —”

“Oh, Tyelpe, you don’t need to _persuade_ me! I said that I didn’t understand, not that I disapprove. If he is yours, then he is mine as well, and there will be time enough to work the problem out.” Belatedly, she looked over toward her mother-in-law, whose hall this was, and who had been studying the three of them with her usual watchful attention.

Nerdanel rose to her full height.

“Curufinwë Tyelperinquar — son of my son — you have brought a Maia of Melkor into my halls. Do you speak for him?”

Celebrimbor got to his feet in answer. “I do.”

“Well then. He’s not the first murderer I’ve had under my roof; by Mandos’ mercy he won’t be the last.” Nerdanel pushed her sleeves back up her arms. “Come along then.”

The two exchanged quick glances.

“Yes, both of you! While you’re perfectly welcome to spend your time here wearing the shrouds of Mandos, should you find yourself wishing for clothing a little more… comprehensive, I’ve put out some things for you in the guest bedroom just at the top of the stairs there. Yes, for you too, Annatar, unless you prefer to clothe yourself by whatever mystical means the Ainur generally employ.”

 

“Well,” said Annatar cheerfully, some time later, stretching out along the mattress in the guest room and examining the quality of the weaving on the bed-linen, “I thought that went quite well, don’t you?”

“I think,” said Celebrimbor, “that _you_ think they’re done.” He began attaching the sleeve of the light over-robe. Valinorean fashion had altered out of recognition since the days before the Darkening, and he could not even put a name to half the dyes that Aman’s textile-masters were using now.

He had been, momentarily, afraid that the guest room would hold clothes that he remembered, though he was somewhat taller and considerably broader-shouldered than he had been in the days when he had spent summers at his grandmother’s estate. But the robes that Nerdanel had brought for her guests were of much more recent make. The fashion for elaborate embroidery that he remembered seemed to have been replaced by multiple layers of sheer and shifting fabrics, creating a depth like that of ink painting. He had noticed Annatar looking through the offered materials with some attention — perhaps seeking his once-customary white — but there were only colors, and after some consideration he had layered oranges and golds and blacks to striking effect.

The jewelry, on the other hand, Celebrimbor recognized at once. None of the Eldar would neglect a guest so far as to let them go unadorned, still less when the guest was a long-lost member of the family. The silver-work — intricate meshed circlets and arm-rings and necklaces was Curufin’s. Annatar had picked one of those pieces up, but set it down almost immediately, selecting delicate electrum ear ornaments instead.

“Your mother’s very like you, isn’t she?” he remarked.

“Well, yes, Annatar, that is the way among Incarnates; the parents must provide both material and pattern —”

“No— though she did a fine job creating you, and her work is to be commended. I mean in the shape of the mind. She’s set at even stranger angles to the world than you are.”

Celebrimbor presented him the back ties to be done up. “Well, we have been fortunate enough to commence your re-introduction to the world of the living with possibly the only person I know who would find _he was right_ entirely persuasive and sufficient as a reason for abandoning your entire previous existence and setting your essence on fire. Now I don’t know why I was so worried about introducing you two; you’ll get on just fine. Grandmother, on the other hand…”

Whatever Annatar was doing with the ties was undoubtedly more complex than had originally been intended. “She rules here?”

Celebrimbor put some thought into conveying the intensity of the requisite response. “ _My grandfather_ listened to her. You can feel her authority here; she runs all through this place like copper through the Dol Caran. It’s like —”

He stopped. It reminded him of nothing so much as his brief visit to Lorien while Galadriel wielded her Ring: that sense of power and deep harmony. He was not sure how much was his altered perception and how much was the clarity of Aman, and the thought of his master-work brought a strange sensation, a painless pressure like a hand on a healed scar.

“Although,” he added, twisting backward to try and catch a glimpse of the knotwork in the ties, “my grandmother is not technically the King of the Noldor. That must be — _oh_ —” He swore. Although Annatar did not appear to recognize the Khuzdul imprecation, the meaning must have been clear enough.

“What?”

“Annatar, besides the Valar, _who knows you’re here_?”

“You. Eru Iluvatar. The people we spent this morning meeting.” Annatar nudged him to the side to reach the second set of ties.

“You don’t imagine, do you, that any of the Valar would have sent any kind of word to the High King?”

“Which one? Ingwe? Olwe? Valinor is rather oversupplied with kings; it’s lit up with authority like a city at festival. Pretty, but wasteful.”

“You know exactly who I’m talking about. The High King of the Noldor. Of _course_ the Valar wouldn’t bother to tell him; they didn’t tell _me_ you were standing on the other side of Mandos’s gates —”  

“Is it any of his business who you marry? Your explanation of Noldor marriage-customs has been regrettably incomplete, but I wasn’t aware you required some sort of royal permission —”

“Come off it, Annatar. You’ve ruled; you always had more taste for it than I did even in Ost-in-Edhil. My word on your behalf may be good enough for my family, but if I’m bringing the ancient enemy of his people into someone’s lands, common courtesy at least dictates that I alert him of the fact.” Without waiting to attach the second sleeve to the over-robe, he went in search of his grandmother.

Nerdanel seemed to have been expecting something like this. “The Powers do learn, but they learn slowly,” she said to him, as they climbed the stairs of the observatory tower on one of the upper terraces. “The sort of news they consider important to communicate to us still follows their logic rather than ours.” A quiet half-smile crossed her face. “Though perhaps you’ve had a chance to observe quite closely just how different their view of the world can be.”

They emerged into a round, white-plastered room at the top of the tower, with a table in the center and a wooden roof for shelter but with the walls open to the wind and offering a full view of the country around. Nerdanel’s halls were built at the foothills of the mountains, not far from where her father’s people lived at the Tamin Martamo, the Forges of the Maker. The terraced fields were green and white, interspersed with stands of cypress and flowering plum, and the wind through the giant bamboo sounded like distant chimes.

“This land seems… well,” he said, searching for the word for the sense of wholeness in the landscape. He could almost hear it: the glad song of harvest and growth. In Middle-Earth, even the places that had been longest in the friendship of the Elves seldom spoke so clearly.

“It is well. Aman was thoroughly protected.”

Celebrimbor put his hand toward the palm-sized stone on the round central table, then drew it back.

“Seeing stones… Do you know, we never did succeed in making them in Middle-Earth? At least not the way they had been; they could help strengthen the Sight but nothing was really clear, and we couldn’t stabilize the temporal correction factor. You could be looking into the future or the past and never know it… And the last even of those were lost with Beleriand.”

“Of course, most of ours were lost too,” Nerdanel pointed out. “This is one of three known originals that were left after the sack of Formenos. It only survived because it was buried in a drawer in the workshop here. An early example, never intended for anything more than a test to see whether the design was feasible.” She did touch the stone, running one strong hand over its dark surface. “There were worlds that ended here as well. Even in Aman.

“We are making seeing stones again, but it’s not the same. They’re much larger now, so the most powerful ones are fixed in place, and they can be unpredictable if you haven’t had much practice in using them. Fëanor’s documentation on their construction was incomplete and contradictory, and the sages at Tirion had to re-develop the art very nearly from the beginning.

“We’re still working through his notes,” she said, her eyes softening, and Celebrimbor had no need to ask whom she was talking about. “He never had any sort of system for organizing his research, and he often wouldn’t so much as talk about something until he’d gotten it to a point he was satisfied with. Even reading his notes is a challenge, let alone understanding them. He’d invent whole scripts, entirely new notation systems, if he thought they’d be more suited to a particular idea — or simply because he’d thought of a new writing system and wanted something to practice it on. We spent most of a century trying to decipher one manuscript that proved to be nothing but a recipe for persimmon custard.” She smiled again, sadly. “It was good persimmon custard.

“There are still a few rooms in the workshop,” she added, “that are very nearly undisturbed from when your grandfather was working there. If you — and that husband of yours — want to take a look at them, you’re welcome to. These halls were less of a priority than the ruins of Formenos, or even than his laboratories in Tirion, but everything’s been meticulously catalogued by the archivists, and then placed back exactly as it was, down to the empty wrappings for rice-sweets and the dust where the apple cores once were.”

She picked up the stone, and its dark surface began to lighten and clear.

“You needn’t expect you’ll escape, either. The Department of Memory Unscarred, the Scholars’ Union for Trans-Alatairean Studies, and the Singers’ College are all going to want to hear everything about what you’ve been doing in Middle-Earth, to say nothing of the advances made by your city of scholars. They’ll probably let you alone at least until the King has had a chance to rule on the status of your Sauron, but they’ll be coming for you sooner or later.”

The stone in her hands was now entirely clear, and colored shapes were coming into focus through its depths. With a shock, he recognized the palace in Tirion, pale and strange with Arien’s light on its walls.

“Nolofinwë and I have been in contact a good deal, since his return. I can’t say he’ll be happy to hear just who it is you’ve brought home, but he will be glad you told him.”

 

Annatar’s enthusiasm at the prospect of looking through Fëanor’s research notes was only slightly dampened when they pushed open the door to the unused workshop and saw the condition in which those notes had been left.

“I did not think anyone — any finite being, anyway — could possibly have a less efficient organizational system than yours,” he said, leafing through a stack of closely written papers. “I suppose that’s why you called yourself _Fëanor’s heir._ ”

“I called _myself-?!”_ Celebrimbor began indignantly, before perceiving that he was being needled. Instead he picked up one of the notepapers and examined it. Though stained where a cup of something hot had once rested on it, the writing, in his grandfather’s strong graceful hand, was perfectly legible. The paper contained a beautifully detailed and carefully observed diagram of a cat’s whiskers, a lengthy equation that had been crossed out and rewritten, and a series of increasingly rude puns apparently intended as suggestions for names of Nolofinwë’s children.

“Look at this.” Annatar was leafing through a notebook, scanning through the numbers and symbols as easily as text, and occasionally laughing under his breath at what he read. “He must have been quarreling with someone, or maybe making a point; this is the basis of an entire non-Endorean hypergeometrical series, and it’s being used to set up the mathematical equivalent of a punch line… the answer is _three_ and it takes the entire book to get to the system that allows the question to be asked.”

“I remember that speech! Or something like it, anyway; it was a tradition at the Feast of the Imaginary Integer at the scholars’ hall where my mother taught sometimes. The lecturer would begin, and if you thought you’d gotten to the answer before they finished explaining the question, you would light your candle, or set your flower to blossoming, and by the end the whole hall would be all light and color… I wonder we never thought to introduce it at the Mirdain.”

He looked at the sturdy table, deep in papers and dust, the high walls lined with mirrors and windows that to be adjusted just so for directing and intensifying light around the space. “The Fëanor that this place is remembers is much… happier than my grandfather as I remember him.”

Anywhere the Eldar passed, anywhere they worked, they were remembered, even in the darkness and confusion of war-torn Middle-Earth. But here in Aman, refined by the long years of peace, there was a clarity like that of a quick smooth river, where the sunlight shone straight to the bottom and glinted off sand and buried stone. The valley and the hall, the very stones of the place, all remembered the Elves who had dwelt there.

Faint but clear, he could perceive his grandfather’s presence as the workshop had known it once. Newly married, newly made a father, pausing in his restless forays back and forth from Tirion and deeper into Aman, passing the summers here as a pleasant refuge. By the time Celebrimbor had moved from childhood to youth, Fëanor came no more to his wife’s summer estate.

“He was so young,” Celebrimbor said softly.

“Don’t open that; it’s extremely corrosive,” said Annatar over his shoulder, as Celebrimbor shifted more papers aside and picked up an unlabeled, stoppered vial.

“I can see that. No, I _can_ see that now. Look at it! It’s practically bristling with -” He found he did not have a word for the quality that he perceived in the heavy glassy liquid; it was not a color nor a type of motion. “...Generosity? Giver-ish-ness? There is something of itself that inclines outward…” He gestured in a manner that was not particularly informative, even to himself, but was intended to convey the property he observed..

Annatar looked extremely gratified. “So you can see _šabaruz_ now?”

“What?” The Valarin word had jarred in his hearing but settled comfortably into his mind; still he was not sure what Annatar meant.

“Ah—” Annatar appeared to be running through the admittedly convoluted tables of Eldarin chemical terminology.   _“Laicë_ , [2] I believe, though now you can see why that’s a very limited term.”

“Oh so this time you’re willing to translate rather than demonstrate?” demanded Celebrimbor, but Annatar was already continuing.

“What a pleasure it is not to have to talk around things! You were always a quick study, but I think that now we shall move on even more smoothly together, you and I…” He looked around the unused workshop: the ancient but apparently perfectly functional water pipes on one end, the worktables and the rows of tools, the burners and the shielded chambers.

“Did your grandmother mean this for our use? This space? Can we start setting up here?”

Celebrimbor’s automatic acquiescence — _of course it is, our doors are always open_ — died on his lips. He had not set foot in a workshop since—

“Annatar,” he said, his throat gone dry, “can we go back?

He was expecting to hear both _of course_ and _of course not,_ but Annatar said nothing, only looked at him with that bright heavy expectation that he had come to know well.

“How far back can we go?”

There was still no answer. For the first time he faced the presence, not merely the thought, of returning to his work, to their Art, to what might lie beyond the Three, the One, the pillar of light over Ost-in-Edhil. He looked again at the empty space — not abandoned, but sleeping — and saw not the shifting depths of the past but the the solid matter and clear edges of the present. It felt like setting weight for the first time on a bone that had been broken, or taking the bandages off a half-healed wound.

“They’re going to ask us everything. About everything,” he said. “The Rings. The Ring-theory. What do we say to them?”

“You were very clear on the sharing of knowledge, once,” said Annatar, and the weight of that expectation — of Annatar looking to him for answers he did not have — bowed his head and darkened his eyes.

“Can we go back?” Celebrimbor said again, and did not know what he hoped to hear in answer.

He heard the rustle of papers being set down. After a moment he felt his hand being taken in both of Annatar’s: the old, practiced motions of the end-of-day massage. Annatar pressed gentle circles around each joint of the fingers, stroked the long furrows between the tendons down toward the wrist.

“We go forward,” he said, calm and matter-of-fact. “That is what I have learned from your kind: there is no going back. You have to work; it’s your nature.”

Celebrimbor said nothing, thought nothing, let images and words alike fade away, and for a long moment only felt the touch of Annatar’s hand on his. There was no memory in his hands, no ages of skill worked into muscle and bone. They were fresh and untried, new-wrought after death.

When Celebrimbor moved away at last, Annatar thought the change had begun. There was a brisk purpose to his motion, and a spark in his eyes, the same that he knew so well from the days in Ost-in-Edhil, when he looked out at the world and saw not only what was, but what might yet be.

He began investigating the workshop, noting its supplies and its equipment, and once stooping to the floor to peer under a set of drawers. Annatar, content to watch him, perched on a workstool, but all at once Celebrimbor’s motion ceased and the quality of his silence changed.

Annatar got to his feet. Celebrimbor was looking at a set of goldsmithing tools in the drawer of the worktable; well-wrought and carefully tended though never so fine as the ones that Annatar had given him in the Great Workshop of the Mirdain so long ago.

“No,” he said through his teeth, “not this, not this—”

His knuckles had gone white where he gripped the table, and his hand, when Annatar set his on top of it, was ice-cold to the touch.

Celebrimbor had grown accustomed to the way that lightless fear would come upon him from time to time, for all that it happened less often now, and passed off more quickly. But here in the familiar safety of his childhood home, he was angry as well as afraid, offended as a lord barred entrance from his own hall.

For his part, Annatar had, with some difficulty, learned to refrain from the immediate and instinctive desire to respond: to argue or distract or simply, by force if necessary, to soothe. So he waited, and after longer than he would have liked, Celebrimbor raised his head.

“You asked great things of me, once,” he said bitterly. He left the other half unsaid: _and now I struggle simply to stand and breathe and keep my sight._

But Annatar looked at him, unfeignedly baffled. “Are you under the impression that I’ve stopped? You remade everything, Curufinwë Tyelperinquar. This is your world, into which I have followed you—” Even the most formal Quenya did not have a mode for expressing the degree of reverence appropriate to what he wished to say, and he slipped into the language of the Powers. “ _Lead, and I shall be led; see, and through thee I shall see.”_

That caught at Celebrimbor, though he still barely knew enough of the language to guess at a translation. “Come here,” he said. There was very little _here_ left between them, but Annatar moved closer nevertheless, stepping behind him so that they stood together as if working on some shared and delicate project. “Touch me.”

His hand was still resting on Celebrimbor’s where he gripped the table, which he refrained from remarking on. Instead he folded his free arm carefully around him, resting his hand so lightly on Celebrimbor’s shoulder that only close attention would register it as a touch at all.

Celebrimbor reacted exactly as he had hoped, twisting suddenly around to face him with a low sound in his throat, knotting his cold hands into his hair, and pulling him down to kiss him. The burnt-sugar taste of fear was acrid in his mouth, but Annatar no longer found that taste a pleasant one.

Celebrimbor was desperate and incautious, fiercely repurposing the agitation thrumming through his body, determined to overwrite it. “Do you think this is a good idea?” Annatar asked him, in a moment when he was left free to speak. Words seemed to be temporarily beyond his companion, so instead of putting forth an argument, he did his best to make Annatar unask the question. His best was extraordinarily effective, and Annatar soon left off questions altogether, speaking into his ear the words that could not be pared down into Quenya, and the endearments that could not be readily shaped into words at all.

 

Tilion rode high and bright in the sky, scattering sharp-edged shadows. It was _Tilion_ here, Celebrimbor thought, walking barefoot along the raised wooden paths over the water-garden, not _the Moon._ Everything in Valinor seemed to be more of a person than a thing: stone and sky, water and earth. They murmured and sang, they looked back at him with familiar eyes. _We remember you, Elda, Noldo, Curufinwë. Do you remember us?_

Deep-throated calls of frogs echoed from the rushes around the edges of the water-garden, and the night-blooming lilies lay open on the water. Work and song did not cease, but the rhythms of the estate had shifted from day to night. In one of the outer sculpture workshops a group of students were learning how to call the qualities of moonlight into stone. Someone was chanting the Naming of the Stars from the rooftop of one of the towers in the main hall. In his mother’s study, he saw a light burning.

Laicanis had preferred the time of the Silver Tree for her own reflections, in the days when there had been nothing but light in the world. Now that darkness was a time instead of a place, she did the difficult, abstract part of her work by night.

She looked up from her work and smiled when he called quietly outside the doorway. “Tyelperinquar. Come in.”

“I worked through your welcome-home theorem,” he said, sitting down on the window seat. The cushions, blue in the daytime, were silver and black in the moonlight.

“I thought you might enjoy it. You can name the characteristic vector, if you like, the one that doesn’t change through linear transformation. I’ve just been calling it _yanta —_ the tengwa, you understand — but if you have something you want to call it, I don’t think the math-masters will object.” [3]

“Unless I named it, say, after my husband,” he pointed out.

“The Sauron vector? That might cause consternation,” Laicanis agreed. “And why would you do that?” She looked at him curiously. “Is that what he is to you? That which doesn’t change despite transformation? You can see why I’d been thinking about linear transformations, thinking of you.”

“I’ve been thinking about it too, in somewhat different terms — which was why that theorem really was so good to come home to, I came to thank you — but yes. I’ve been thinking about what transformation means. What’s preserved in the translation from one… one module, one field, one vector space -”

“Say _from one world_ , the poets will understand it better.”

“All right then. What’s preserved in the translation from one world to another.”

She left her work at the table and came to sit beside him in the window, and did not offer an answer.

“You’re not entirely all right, are you?”

“Is it that obvious?”

“Oh, Tyelperinquar, it’s the most natural thing in the world. Your soul’s still raw with the fact of your death, and you pushed yourself quite hard in returning as soon as you did.” The night breeze came through the window, cool and rich with the scent of the fields. “Dying was the most significant thing to happen to your body; of course your soul’s going to remember it. I couldn’t go near water for years.

“It does heal over, though. You don’t stop learning; your soul doesn’t stop learning. There are more things in the world than death.”

“It is late,” Celebrimbor said after a long silence, “to ask you for your blessing.”

“Really? I would have said it was early.”

“I mean that I’m not — not going to change my choices, you understand.”

She smiled. “So he is your _yanta_ then, your characteristic vector? Transform the world however else you will, that line runs true?”

There was deep comfort in being understood so quickly, even with such distance and such strange matter having come between them. “Yes. So I don’t….perhaps I’m not asking you for anything at all. I just want you to know that it matters to me. What you think matters. Even if it doesn’t alter my choice — it does matter.”

“You mean what I think of your Annatar?” she asked. “Or what I think of you, for choosing him?”

The answer, of course, was both, but before he could bring himself to speak, his mother went on. “I think that I am not in any position to condemn you. I am, after all, still married to a man that you rejected.”

“Mother—” The question of his father had been on his mind as well, quieter and less urgent than that of his husband. _What do you think of me, for rejecting him?_

“Thank you for taking care of him,” she said quietly. “I saw what he did to the world, saw what was left of the spirit that I loved when he came in bitterness to death.”

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“My child.” She took his hand. “Such courage you grew into.”

The old doubts and sorrows were fixed and still now, distant but clear as diagrams. He remembered when they had moved sharp beneath the surface of his thought, divided between _you should never have left your father_ and _you should have left him centuries before, when there might have been something of your family left to save._

“Not courage.” It was evaluation, not self-accusation. “How it gnawed at me, in the years after! If it had been courage I would have broken with him before Finrod’s death, if it had been courage I would have saved him somehow — No, it’s all right,” he said, as she drew breath to interrupt. “I’ve — Father and I, now that we’ve met again, it all seems to matter less now. Death pays all debts, as they say.”

“Do they?” his mother exclaimed. “What an extraordinary expression.”

Belatedly he remembered that the expression was a soldier’s jest of Beleriand, and his mother would have no reason to be familiar with it.

“I saw him, in Mandos. We have — made peace. He cared for me. There is still so far he has to go before he can bear the world’s full weight again, but I think that he will return one day. His heart is turned towards life; it must be, for he helped me towards it.” The smile that lit Laicanis’ face, bright as the moonlight, eased his own heart.

“Now his opinion on your husband, that’s one I’m really interested to hear. Did he know you went to his arms, when you left Mandos?”

“He… well…” said Celebrimbor carefully, “he knew I went to seek him. Finding him turned out to be a great deal easier than I had anticipated. To tell you the truth, I expected at this moment to be undertaking some world-spanning quest to recover him, but instead…” He gestured at the study, and by extension the estate beyond. “Here we are.”

Laicanis almost laughed. “You do know, my Tyelperinquar, that I am possibly the easiest person you will face, if you mean to stand at the side of your Sauron and come back to the world.”

“Yes, I thought you might be!”

“Not just because I know the more unsavory parts of his story only from hearsay, you understand; half of Aman knows him only as a name in song. But not everyone will find ‘he was right’ an entirely persuasive and sufficient reason for why a tyrant, bent on domination, threw everything aside at a word from you.”

“It was,” Celebrimbor said carefully, “more than a word.”

“I thought it would be. What was it you were right about?”

Celebrimbor considered for a long time.

“That what he had done to himself wasn’t worth it,” he said. Then, “No. I _was_ right about that, but he couldn’t have seen it at the time… That what he wanted, he could not obtain by force.”

Laicanis looked at him searchingly. “He must have loved you very dearly,” she said at last, “to have realized that.” He knew her turn of mind well enough to trace the track of her thought: that for one who commanded as much force as one of the Ainur, the things that force could not obtain were few indeed.

 

Guests came and went from Nerdanel’s halls. Ambarussa, who alone of her children had returned to the world from the darkness of death, came home from hunting in the south, and they wept together to see their nephew come back to them. They wept as well, Celebrimbor thought, for the image of their brother, and for the father who they had little hope of seeing again.  A short time later they were off again with horses and hounds, ranging the northern forests.

One morning as they breakfasted together on an open porch high on one of the terraces, Nerdanel came to sit cross-legged on the floor beside them, a tea cup steaming in her hands.

“Annatar,” she said without preamble, “can you say something to Aulë?”

Annatar suddenly looked very blank, so it was Celebrimbor who responded. “Aulë himself? About what?”

“You don’t feel it?” Nerdanel asked. “He’s… well, I don’t know exactly what it is he wants, but he clearly wants something here, and I would think it has to do with Annatar.”  She turned to him. “You were Aulë’s, after all, weren’t you? His attention hangs over this place like a thunderstorm. It’s been building for weeks. The rocks are growing lively, the tools are waiting for his word. My students can’t work like this.”

“I have reason to believe,” said Annatar, sipping the pale gold tea with great deliberateness of motion, “that Aulë has no interest whatever in conversing with me.”

“Well, if you’re not going to talk to him,” said Nerdanel briskly, “someone needs to. You can’t go on ignoring each other _at_ each other; my people live here and there’ll be earthquakes if this goes on. I’ve tried invoking him, but he seems to feel some delicacy about intruding—”

“So he’s looming over this valley hoping that one of us will come to him?” asked Celebrimbor, laughing. “That seems in keeping with my experience of his kindred. I’ll talk to him. Grandmother; do the Tamin Martamo still stand?”

“Still stand?” Nerdanel looked at him in puzzlement. “Why wouldn’t they?”

Another habit from Middle-Earth, that assumption of change. The carved halls of her father Mahtan’s people were delved into the glittering depths of the Pelori themselves, with their great smithies where Aulë himself was wont to walk in form among them, and pour out his knowledge to those that he loved.

“Well, then! It’s not more than a few days’ journey, and I will be glad to see them again. Aulë, I imagine, will speak with me, given everything.”

“You’re not going by yourself?” Annatar looked almost alarmed.

“Unless you’re coming with me?” The spark in Annatar’s eye answered that. “No, surely I can trust you on your own here, and I won’t be gone for long.”

The struggle between Annatar’s reluctance to confront his old master and his reluctance to let Celebrimbor out of his sight was subtle but evident, until Celebrimbor resolved it for him. “Stay! I’m sure you and my grandmother can find plenty to talk about.”

 

The journey into the mountains, along the well-used road from Nerdanel’s estates, was not a long one. When they learned his errand and its purpose, his grandmother’s people did not detain him for the days of feasting that had, in the Years of the Sun, become customary in celebrating the return of a long-lost kinsman. Instead, he made his way into the halls delved into the mountainside, and then beyond, the way that those who sought the Maker and his gifts must walk.

The carved hallways and delicate grottos were not as he remembered them from when he had walked this way in his youth, studying with Mahtan Aulëndur as his father and grandfather had done before him. But they were not unfamiliar. With a start he realized that the soaring pillars and intricate carvings, art blending seamlessly into the native shapes of mineral and stone, reminded him of nothing so much as Khazad-dum. There was a brief moment of something like vertigo as the memory of his years among the Dwarves — across the Sea, before Eregion, before _Annatar —_ rose within him. He set one hand lightly against the cool stone wall, and felt, rather than saw, the chambers around him, leading inward and down. _Did the Fathers of the Dwarves walk this road in their dreams,_ he wondered, _or is this simply how Aulë’s realm appears to me now?_

He walked on. The light was very dim, but the darkness was not oppressive. In the Years of the Trees places like this — caverns in mountains, the dense heart of the forest — were the closest thing the elves knew to true darkness, and darkness then was not the a thing of horror, but rare and strange and tinged with awe. Here he had learned to read stone with his fingertips. He remembered his great-grandfather accompanying him for the first time to seek Aulë at his forges, laying his great hand over his against the rock, asking him what his hands could see.

Now, as then, he felt the same life under his hand, as if the mountain itself were some great sleeping animal stirring toward wakefulness. The light grew ahead of him, but it was more than light, or other than light: a clarity that was not a matter of sight —

“It is the approach of Aulë Mountain-Shaker,” Mahtan had said to him. “On your knees, child, do him reverence. He is a kind lord, but he is our lord, and we honor him.”

But Celebrimbor was no longer a child, and he walked onward, into the forges of the Lord of Earth and Stone. And there was Aulë himself, at work upon an indescribably tiny fragment of matter.

Celebrimbor gazed, his purpose lost for a moment in awe. It was no element that existed anywhere in Arda, that he recognized immediately. It was too heavy — heavier than anything he had known could exist — and too unstable. By rights it should have collapsed already; whatever Aulë was using to contain it must be as far beyond comprehension as the fact of this impossible, intricate atom itself. Yet it was an earth metal, slotting neatly into the second _tyelle_ of Naugwen’s tengwar of matter. [4]

Distantly, he knew he could not be seeing this at all;  this working was too small and subtle to catch light, let alone the sight of the eyes. It was not a thing at all, exactly, but an involute pattern of tension and tendency. The weight of wonder stopped his breath: a pressure like desire, or perhaps like terror.

“Lord Aulë,” he said, and his mouth was dry, “am I dreaming?”

The Maker released his creation. The air wavered as if with heat, the mountain thrummed, and when he could see again, Aulë wore not the Elven form that he used among his pupils, but that of a Dwarf, monumental as the stone figures that lined the Hall of the Kings in the depths of Khazad-dum.

“You are not asleep,” Aulë said to him, and his voice was like stone within earth, like metal within stone.

“This is — not as I remember it  from childhood.”

“No. It would not be, given what you have espoused. You are closer to our kindred now. Curufinwë. Son of Fëanor’s line. I have been waiting for you.”

“Yes, my grandmother noticed!” Celebrimbor was recovering, with some effort, his equilibrium. “I don’t know if I would have, though, if she hadn’t explained it to me. Aman is just so much more… so alive, so wakeful, than Middle-Earth, that your presence, or attention, didn’t seem that much more unexpected than everything else. You could have just said something, you know.”

Aulë laughed, but only once, and quietly. He still seemed to be waiting for something.

“What is it?” asked Celebrimbor after a moment. “You wanted to speak to me, and I am here.”

The question that Aulë was forming seemed to be as complex — and as heavy, and as unstable — as the atom to which he had been giving shape. _Anger_ and _thanks_ and _warning_ gathered around him, swirling around a core of _curiosity_ and _grief_ and what he now knew enough of the Ainur to recognize as _love_.

 

“I’m glad you’re here, Annatar,” said Nerdanel without preamble, striding into the room with her firm, long-legged gait. “I’ve been looking for a chance to speak to you alone.”

“Indeed,” said Annatar, “I imagine that was part of Tyelperinquar’s purpose in leaving me here. His approach to diplomatic matters can be idiosyncratic, but I can hardly criticize it, now.” He gave her his second-most winning smile, neither too distant nor too dazzling.

As a matter of sheer habit, he was scanning the mind and character of the woman before him, mapping out a quick diagram of her desires and aversions, the levers both delicate and crude by which all minds were moved. Nerdanel’s mind gave him some trouble, though, not in its complexity but in its nature. Though he was not accustomed to think in metaphors, perhaps his time with Celebrimbor had altered his perception. He saw not levers, threads, or lines of force, in the shape of her spirit, but water-worn stone.

She seemed to know precisely what he was doing, and looked back at him without judgement or defense. Elves, and higher than Elves, had quailed before the steadiness of that gaze, and Annatar felt suddenly, unsettlingly exposed. She did not read him from the inside out, as the Ainur and those who followed the Ainur did. She looked at the outward form and noted it as outward form, waiting for Annatar to reveal whatever else of his character he chose. He watched her observing his unbound hair and his lack of jewelry, and the neat bite-marks at his neck and collarbone which he had not troubled to conceal.

“I don’t think you got a chance to answer the last time,” she said, “since my grandson interrupted. Whose are you?”

 

Celebrimbor could not guess how much time had passed, there in the heart of the mountains, locked in strange colloquy with one of the Lords of the Valar. Out of concern for his finite nature, Aulë had begun at first in words: “For what he who was once my servant has done to you, Curufinwë, my heart is grieved…” But seeing how readily Celebrimbor’s apprehension followed him, he passed from speech into song and then into shape, as if his accusations could be wrought from the substance of the world itself. Trust and betrayal and loss were his themes, and the marring of beauty. Books burned, flawed metal shattered, irreversible chemical and thermodynamic processes sparked and faded. _And you whom I treasured, you my people, you stained your swords with your brothers’ blood. You have returned, beyond death, beyond guilt, beyond the brokenness you chose, bringing Sauron with you. I want to thank you. I want to warn you. I want to believe it. I cannot believe it._

The air cooled around him. Celebrimbor drew it, gasping, into his lungs; he was not wholly dreaming.

“I did not come to plead his case before you,” he said, and the sound of his voice was small and strange to him.

“Nor do I ask you to, child,” said the Maker, and a great weariness seemed to have come upon him. “It is you I seek to understand. What you have done. How it works.”

“Are you asking me to draw you a diagram?” But Aulë did not smile. The Lord of Matter regarded him with the same intense, serious, troubled attention he remembered from the youngest journeymen of the Mirdain, faced for the first time with a question they did not know how to answer or even to approach.

“No,” said Celebrimbor more softly, “I could not do that, or if I could it would be a diagram the size of the world itself. Forgiveness is not a mechanism. Is it so far from your understanding? For I believe you also love him, Aulë.”

Aulë did not deny it. “He should not be loved. How can I say of faith broken and knowledge twisted, of terror and suffering, that the one who wrought this should be loved?”

Stone groaned within the mountain. A fine dust sifted over them. “I descended into Arda to give good gifts to its people. I gave them Sauron. I gave them Gorthaur the Cruel. Will they thank me for that?”

“I would.”

The tremors in the rock stopped abruptly and all was echoless silence.

“You confound me, child of the One,” said Aulë heavily.

“A world that is the better for Annatar’s existence — I can’t argue my way to that. I can’t argue anyone’s way to that. I can only…” He searched for a word, briefly wondering if there were a diagram that might help after all.  “Have you not also been forgiven?”

The embers all glowed at once around them. “You speak of the great pardon for my over-reach.”

“Well, yes and no. I don’t mean by the One. I mean by your children. By the Dwarves, whom you meant to destroy.” He put a hand, unconsciously, to his hair, where he had once worn bronze Dwarven ornaments that he had earned in friendship. “Do you know, Lord Aulë, how much you are loved, on the other side of the sea?”

And Aulë knew. As Celebrimbor had felt the vibration of the living rock of the mountain, he now felt the depth of that knowledge and the terrible weight of love all around him, stretching back into a time before the Elves had awakened under the stars. But Celebrimbor’s own thought went back only a short way, to Narvi who had been his friend, and worked beside him, and spoken to him of Aulë the Maker. _He spared us. We saved him. Because of us, he has children rather than slaves._

“I had a friend among them. He died. Some of them say that when they die, you have prepared a place for them where they will sleep until the healing of the world. He said differently, but I never knew, with him, whether he meant it for a lesson, or a story, or merely a flight of fancy...”

He did not get as far as the question, for Aulë looked at him severely from under brows as bristly as those of the Dwarves themselves. “Their fate is their own, Noldo,” he said. “I guard my children’s secrecy. But I will tell you this. They are not forgotten. They are not idle.”

 

Annatar was not in the habit of providing direct answers, least of all to those who had the power to deny him. He was on the point of offering some shimmering deflection, when he recalled to whom he was speaking. Out of respect for Tyelperinquar, he could not treat his family as problems to solved. With an effort that would not have been detectable by any of the Eldar (save perhaps one) he returned:

“Why do you ask?”

“In my observation, the Maiar generally belong to one or another of the Valar,” said Nerdanel matter-of-factly. “Well, _belong_ is a careless word. _Answer to_ , _partake of, reflect, glorify…_ And you’re not one of Aulë’s anymore. You chose Morgoth, and then you chose — well, I think you chose my grandson.

“I’m not asking you why you changed,” she said, forestalling him before he could speak. “I’m asking you what you think now that’s different from what you thought when you looked at Melkor and saw… whatever it was that you saw.”

The juxtaposition was an uncomfortable one. The memory of Melkor and his service was shot through with new and unpleasant lights. Honesty was becoming more difficult by the second; intrigued, he noted his own thoughts shying away from the question.

“It was not different. Not in essence,” said Annatar, forcing himself through the question like wire being pulled through a draw plate. “He had a vision that was greater than my own; I gave myself over to it.”

“I was always deeply unimpressed by the scope of Melkor’s vision,” said Nerdanel, half to herself. “There are so many things to do with the world besides enforcing your will upon it.”

“So your grandson persuaded me.”

“Persuaded you? I know that’s enough for strange-humored Laicanis. For her there’s very little space between the thought and the deed, persuade her mind and she is persuaded. There’s a consistency about her, like metal or glass, she’s the same all the way through. I’ve noted something like that in many of the Ainur; perhaps she recognizes it in you. But I’m not your mother-in-law, Annatar, and I need more of an explanation. How exactly did Tyelperinquar ‘persuade’ you?”

Surely the truth would make no one happy. He already had half a dozen responses that would serve his turn: deflections, circumlocutions, outright lies, words that would leave Nerdanel contented and this uncomfortable line of questioning dropped. “He... made his case to me with words and deeds. He hazarded his own person to do it.”

“A poor hazard, it seems, since he paid the full forfeit. Has he then grown worse at games of chance since his uncles taught him to cheat at dice?”

Annatar had never once observed Celebrimbor playing games of chance in all his years in Eregion, and privately resolved to ask him about it at the next opportunity. “Very well, not _hazard_ ; say rather _spend_ and come nearer the mark.”

“He seems to think that his life, and yours, were a fair price to stop you from doing - whatever it was that you were in the middle of; distance and time have elided it to _conquest_. As I understand it,” said Nerdanel tartly, “my grandson is hardly the first person to have died in the attempt to prove you wrong.”

The world was bright and narrow. The past bit at him; Nerdanel’s eyes would not leave him. “Felagund — that is who you’re thinking of, isn’t? — attempted to prove me wrong, failed, and then I killed him. Tyelperinquar — what I did to him _was_ the proof that I was wrong.” Against his will the end came back to him: the emptiness where his friend had been. “I saw my dream at hand, and I believed it worth paying any price to grasp. But your grandson showed me a price that was not worth paying. It is his world I have chosen.”

Nerdanel studied him for a long moment, then set her strong hand on his shoulder. “I think I’m not the only one you need to say this to.”

“I have… made it clear to Tyelperinquar already.”

“I should certainly hope so!” Nerdanel actually laughed. “No, I mean to your old master. I don’t think he understands your choice, and are you really going to leave Tyelperinquar to explain it on his own?”

 

How much time had passed in the world outside the mountain, Celebrimbor could not say. It must have been longer than it seemed, however, for as he and Aulë were deep in their speech together, he looked up, and saw Annatar, once again standing in the doorway, a small clear light against the soaring black stone. Surprise, delight, and relief flooded through him, but Annatar cast him one rueful look before turning to face his old master, whom he had betrayed in the beginning of the world.

“Lord Aulë.”

“ _Mairon,”_ rumbled the Smith. The air grew heavy, the walls were already wavering and the mountain itself resounding with a low note somewhere between earthquake and song.

“Annatar!” Celebrimbor cried, his voice sounding thin and fragile, as if existing on only one plane of reality were barely adequate. “Come in! We have just been discussing you. You have been playing me false, it seems, at least in the matter of language!”

“What on earth are you talking about, Tyelperinquar?” The overlapping versions of reality were dizzying and hard to look at directly. Great shadows and strange shapes trailing him, Annatar came in and took a seat next to him as calmly and naturally as if he had happened to walk in on a language debate among the Mirdain.

“No wonder I haven’t been able to pick up much of the language of the Powers from you,” Celebrimbor said. “If I understand Aulë rightly, you haven’t been speaking standard Valarin with me at all. I was just asking about _enne se_ - _šabarzihi_ ; Aulë, what does that mean?”

“I cannot say,” said Aulë. “It is not a sentence that can be given sense in your tongue, for it has none in ours.”

“It means,” said Annatar, “precisely what I want it to mean.”

“It implies an existentially impossible relationship,” said Aulë. “It is nonsense.” The Vala, still maintaining himself carefully in a comprehensible form, turned back to Celebrimbor. “The absence of the subject indicates the reverential voice, which is exclusively used for service, worship. But _se_ is the particle of command; _sabr_ the root for ‘to yield oneself, to surrender, to bestow lavishly.’” Aulë shook his head. “ _Yield yourself, my master?_ A phrase without meaning. You cannot command what you serve. Under what circumstances does he use it?”

Annatar was quite still and entirely without expression, and Celebrimbor knew that the slightest wavering on his own part, the slightest doubt or discomfort, would pierce him to the quick. But he had left shame behind long ago in Eregion, when he had thrown down his sword at Sauron’s feet.

“Is your objection,” he said, “to Annatar’s phrasing, or to the situation that gives rise to it? Because it doesn’t sound meaningless to me.”

“And if,” added Annatar, who could reliably be drawn into a language debate under circumstances even more tense than these, “you can translate what I’ve said well enough to know what I’m trying to communicate, then your quarrel is not with the language, but with the fact of linguistic innovation.”

“There is a difference between linguistic innovation and linguistic mutilation,” Aulë rumbled, “although I cannot expect one who left his appointed place to waste his talents in marring the great works of creation to recognize that difference.”

“I dispute that characterization; I am expanding the capacity of the language to allow me to express myself with precision.”

“And not without beauty, either,” offered Celebrimbor. “I may not entirely understand what’s being said, but I do find it — well, compelling. Attractive.” He swallowed the rest of the sentence, but Aulë was already answering.

“Of course you would. You’re made of matter; those are words of Power. If my former apprentice chose to command you from a position of authority, it’s doubtful that you could resist.”

Annatar’s indrawn breath at that made the soft, ominous noise of a gas furnace being lit. “Are you under the impression, Aulë, that I use the reverential voice carelessly, without meaning? I stand by what I said when I left you. _I will only serve the greatest that I know_.” The air around them grew heavy and glassy; the stone groaned deep in the mountain.

“And with that,” said Celebrimbor hastily, “I will take my leave; I am sure you have a great deal to talk about and you probably don’t wish to confine yourselves to the sort of expression that I could be expected to survive. I may be _closer to your kindred_ now but my ears are already bleeding and I think we’ll all be happier if I come out of this with my mind intact.”

He clasped Annatar’s hand quickly as he passed him, and the shock of his touch was like the sudden discharge of electricity. He was speaking to his old master as one of the lesser gods to one of the greater and it would be dangerous to remain. But the thought that they were now ready to speak to each other lifted his heart as he hurried up and out of the Forges of the Maker.

 

What it was that Sauron and Aulë said to each other, Celebrimbor did not ask. The people in Mahtan’s halls looked warily up at the mountain; they rubbed their ears and their temples, soothed fretful dogs, and moved breakable objects to secure locations. But Celebrimbor was not met with the recriminations he had half-expected. _What have you called down on us, what have you roused from slumber?_ That was another relic of life in Middle-Earth, he realized with an odd pang, where venturing into dark places of the world or the mind might waken danger not just for the venturer but for their people.

When Annatar re-emerged at last, with not a hair out of place and the eye-watering glory of his presence so far muted he might pass for one of the Eldar, he offered no account of the encounter, and seemed somewhat subdued.

“How did you get here so quickly?” Celebrimbor asked as they made their way back down the mountain.

“If you’re going to use an ordinal term like _quickly,_ you’re really going to have to indicate what scale you’re using. I spoke to your grandmother, and then I came here with all the speed the situation merited, neither more nor less.”

“You cast this veil aside—” Celebrimbor brushed his fingers across his waist “—and flew bodiless through the air, on the wings of thought?”

Annatar gave him an amused look at the mangled line of Sindarin poetry. “ _This veil_ is now the means by which I am joined to you in the world; I don’t regard it as lightly as you seem to think. I walked, though the world can be persuaded to offer me swift passage if requested.”

Celebrimbor laughed. “Well, I don’t see any need for such request on the way back. Here we are again, Annatar, walking through the Blessed Realm, and I have almost forgotten how it feels to have time whirling forward as it does in Middle-Earth.” He looked out from the slopes of the mountain over the foothills, with morning mist rising from the valleys and here and there a tree white with flowers. “I… I suppose the world has changed a good deal, there. A century costs so much more, and counts for more as well. And here? This what we were trying to remember, what we were reaching for. _As fair as Aman._ It’s not just Aman’s beauty, it’s the — _life_ here. What happens when the land and the Eldar live together, at peace, growing into each other. _Quendi_ we call ourselves; the part of Arda which speaks. That is our Art and our excellence, and it is this Art which we teach to and practice on and learn from the world itself. Could you imagine that, in Eregion, with not just the voices of the Eldar, but of Men and Dwarves — and Ainur, why not? A world which speaks, a world which sings…”

 

It was some hours past midnight when they passed again into Nerdanel’s lands. The great hall was darkened, so they decided to enter through the kitchen annex, where a small and homely light was burning. Inside, Nerdanel was steeping white tea in its white-clay pot, and seated at the kitchen table was the High King of the Noldor.

Celebrimbor had been anticipating some sort of message from Fingolfin ever since alerting him to Annatar’s presence in Aman, but he was hardly prepared for the sight of his great-uncle, the wise, war-hardened king who had already become half-legend before his death had shaped all the songs of Beleriand.

“My lord and kinsman.” He started to make the Amanyar gesture of obeisance, but recollected himself, and instead gave him the royal salute that had become customary in Beleriand: the open hand over the closed fist.

Fingolfin returned the greeting, smiling to see it. “Curufinwë Tyelperinquar. Strange seas have swelled between us since we rode the plains of Ard-Galen, and the sun will rise no more on the Mountains of Shadow. Come, sit beside me, and rest from your wandering. And bring your companion with you; it is his case that has brought me here in haste.”

“Finwë Nolofinwë Arakano,” said Annatar, drawing up a stool and holding his gaze. “Wisest of Finwë’s sons; High King of the Noldor in the Blessed Realm. Greetings to you, and peace upon your reign.”

Unconsciously, Celebrimbor had tensed, waiting for the words to slip over into flattery or veiled threat. Annatar’s tone was cool and measured and impeccable and he remembered it well from their days in Ost-in-Edhil when Annatar would deal deftly with some Numenorean envoy or foreign prince come offering alliance.

Fingolfin studied Annatar for a long moment. “Gorthaur the Cruel,” he said at last. “You do not wear so foul a form as the stories give you.”

“If by _the stories_ you mean whatever you were able to extract from the orcs you captured, I’m not surprised. They are not complex creatures; a certain presence was called for to command the appropriate degree of respect.”

“I wouldn’t have recognized you from Maedhros’s description either.”

Nerdanel, who had been observing their discussion silently, drew in a breath, and Celebrimbor winced. He had never heard Maedhros speak in any detail about his experiences in Angband, but of course Fingolfin would have thoroughly questioned his uncle, as soon as he was strong enough to answer, and Maedhros would have held nothing back—

“The forms I wore in Angband,” said Annatar, “were not, in general, designed for the comfort of the Eldar. Some were beautiful to them, but after a certain degree of exposure, those tended to cause almost as much agitation as the more abstract shapes.”

Almost against his will, Fingolfin seemed to be drawn into the conversation. “My people tend to conflate beauty with goodness; it’s a persistent weakness of ours. I know that, clearly—” his eyes flickered to Celebrimbor, “you do as well.

“Curufinwë Tyelperinquar is under no illusions as to my nature,” Annatar said sharply. “But for you, what is it you would have of me, Finwë Nolofinwë? A case made? An atonement offered?”

Fingolfin shook his head slowly. “Only to see you, Sauron, to learn what manner of creature you are, that I may determine what to do on behalf of my people. You were our enemy, and the servant of our Enemy. This is no court,” he added, gesturing to the strings of onions and herbs hanging from the kitchen ceiling, “though the duty of judgement falls to me. The Valar did not see fit to inform me of the fact that you were at large in Aman.”

A quick glance passed between him and Nerdanel; though Fingolfin was speaking in the awareness of the weight of his office there was evidently a good deal he could say on the matter and was electing not to.

“Tell me, Sauron, or Annatar as you now are called, what path brought you from the gates of Angband to the heart of the Blessed Realm.”

 

The discussions, or negotiations, went on for the rest of the night, until the air turned suddenly chill and the stars began fading in the lightening sky. At one point Laicanis slipped in, took up a place by the beehive oven, and watched the proceedings with interest. Celebrimbor could hear the household stirring, but no one came into the kitchens.

“I’m certain the household knows he’s here,” Nerdanel said to him in a low tone, nodding at Fingolfin. She set another pot of water on the brazier to boil. “Not everyone here can be so deeply sunk into their work they wouldn’t notice the presence of the King among us! But as long as he’s not officially visiting, we’re not failing in our duties by not offering him the sort of greeting that he merits. Or something like that. It’s not particularly important to me — anyone can turn up in my kitchen at any hour — but those sorts of rituals mean a great deal to some people.”

The sky was streaked with gold when Fingolfin excused himself and got up to pace along the terrace, to stretch his limbs and to clear his head. After a moment, Celebrimbor went after him. He had refrained from intervening in the conversation — the King of the Noldor had not addressed him, after all, and Annatar’s answers had been direct and unevasive, if discomforting to hear. Fingolfin looked up as he approached, and he saw in his face that he had been right to follow him.

“At some point, Tyelperinquar, when all this…” he gestured behind him to the kitchen, “has been settled, you shall speak to me of the new realms of the Eldar and the Edain on the Further Shores. For long years, in Namo’s darkness, I could not even imagine what could endure beyond the ashes, past the ruin of all our hopes. But you saw it, you built it, and so did even your Annatar, in his way. It is a strange thing, to see _hope_ in a servant of Morgoth, when Angband ground the hope out of even its foes. I wonder if it was his service that preserved that in him, or something else?

“To tell you the truth, I didn’t expect to recognize him quite so clearly, but now that I’ve spoken with him a little…” He shook his head. “That was definitely the hand and the mind behind the sorties during the Watchful Peace. At first we thought the attacks were simply random — some of us even hoped that Morgoth was too stupid to stop mounting attacks that he couldn’t hope to win — but then I realized they were all a series of tests: ways of assessing our defenses, in particular to keep abreast of whatever advances in weaponry we’d achieved.”

“Investigating how things were made,” said Celebrimbor quietly, “and how they might be broken.”

“Whether the defense of a realm or the defense of the mind and heart,” said Fingolfin heavily. “And yet already I find myself thinking _if we had had such a one on our side, what might we have accomplished._ A foolish thought, a dangerous one; the strength he might have brought us would not have been fit to be used. And yet from what he has said of your labors in Ost-in-Edhil…”

He left his thought there, and returned indoors. Annatar looked up from where he had been sunk in conversation with Laicanis.

“I will not attempt to demand punishment for you,” Fingolfin said, standing in the early light slanting through the windows. “The judgement that allowed you to return to the world was made by One higher than I, and I cannot gainsay it. Nor will I question the decision of the Valar in releasing you to the custody of the one you have chosen. But their justice is not my justice. I am a King, and most particularly, the king of the Exiles Returned. You are not under my authority, Annatar, but my people are, and I cannot pardon you on their behalf. If they choose -” he nodded gravely at Nerdanel and Laicanis, “to allow you through their gates, into their lands, beneath their roofs, none shall hinder them. But you shall not come into Tirion without leave, nor shall you wander without warning through the cities of the Noldor in Aman. So I have spoken.”

Annatar rose to his feet and, very slightly, inclined his head.

“And now,” Fingolfin said, looking at Nerdanel, “not as your King, nor your guest, but in payment for your rest disturbed and a night of heavy matters, may an old friend and brother have the honor of sharing a morning meal with you?”

“He asks like that,” said Nerdanel to Annatar, “because he’s a far better cook than I am, but is too polite to say it. Of course, Nolo, don’t be ridiculous, and may I request your rice porridge with the pickled radishes? We should still have a jar of them somewhere about —”

But as the High King of the Noldor went to the kitchen shelves to look through the earthenware jars of pickles and preserves, there came from outside the kitchen a great noise of barking and belling, a glad cacophony of hounds.

“ _The steps of guests are numbered as shoals,_ ” murmured Laicanis, quoting a Telerin-inflected proverb that relied on a complicated pun about the counting-words used for groups of fish. “Nerdanel, are Ambarussa back so soon? What—”

Before she could get any further, the door to the terrace was pushed aside. In staggered a figure that Celebrimbor knew but could not at first believe truly present. But the bright hair and the brighter garments were unmistakably those of Finrod Felagund and the person slumped against his side, half-supported, half-carried, was his father.

Behind them, his youngest uncles were crowding in the doorway. “Look what we found in the woods!” called one of them cheerfully. Celebrimbor’s mother leaped to her feet.

“Laicanis! I believe I’ve got something of yours!” Finrod waved his free hand as she rushed to him. Curufin raised his eyes at the sound of her voice, but could not manage more than a groan as he dropped his head onto her shoulder.

“Atarinke… are you hurt? Is he hurt?” she asked Finrod, taking Curufin’s weight and helping him toward a bench in the suddenly crowded kitchen. “I didn’t feel him return. I should have felt him return —”

“There’s just barely enough of him to exist in the world,” said Finrod, with a good cheer that seemed somewhat incongruous. “I picked him up in Irmo’s woods; I think the land may have been trying to send him off to Lorien so that he could dream his way whole. But he was fighting it; can you believe he was actually coming to me to _apologize?”_ Finrod clapped Curufin on his slumped shoulder. “Pulling repentance out of himself as if it were his own intestines - which I suppose it is, after a sense.”

“I thought that you pressed your strength in coming home so early, Tyelpe,” said one of the twins, “but this is beyond all.”

“Yes, when you left Mandos that was like leaving the healers’ tents before you’ve fully gotten your strength back.” added the other Ambarussa.

“This is like getting up while you’re still dripping blood and dragging yourself out of the tent on the grounds that ‘fresh air is good for you.’” Laughter echoed back and forth between them. Quietly leaving the fractious family to negotiate their reunion, Fingolfin retreated to the hearth table where he carried on with the preparations for a breakfast suddenly grown much larger.

“That does sound rather like Curvo,” Finrod said.

“No, that was Turko. Curvo would milk every minute of injury for the maximum amount of sympathy.” Though Curufin had been nearer in friendship with his older brother Celegorm, he was closest to the twins in age, and growing up they had never let him forget it.

Laicanis paid them no attention, combing her husband’s lank hair back from his face. “Mandos let you go in this condition?”

“Mandos… nothing to do with it.” rasped Curufin in a hoarse whisper.

“Mandos,” said Finrod, “gave you a stern warning about pushing yourself to live before you were ready.”

Nerdanel, seeing that Finrod was in better condition to respond than her son, looked to him for an explanation. “How did he — how is he here?”

“The same way any of the Dead come back to the world,” said Finrod, “scrape together enough self to face what you’ve done, what you’ve suffered, who you are. And he did do it; it’s not as though he’s here under false pretenses. Insofar as he’s here at all.”

“No false pretenses! Can you imagine it, Curvo without his cunning?”

“No wonder there’s so little of him!” The twins’ laughter sounded unsettlingly like the laughter of blue jays or of wild dogs.

“It’s not enough to say you’re sorry,” Finrod went on, ignoring them, “you have to mean it. Of course in Mandos there’s no difference; the Dead can’t lie. Come to think of it, I’m not sure that Curvo could lie right now if he tried. He has spent what little strength he has in walking out of Death. When he couldn’t walk, he crawled. His deeds were heavy.”

“I thought I would never see you again,” Laicanis said to her husband, her voice low and clear. “After what you’d done. What you’d become. _Curvo—_ ” Laicanis was not of a demonstrative character, but she held him close, as if she could pour some of her strength into him.

“My cool flame,” he murmured into her shoulder, “my unbent light. I am sorry. I am sorry.”

“Personally I think this is all one of Curvo’s schemes,” said the one of the Ambarussa Celebrimbor was almost certain was Amras.

“To avoid the punch in the face that he knows he deserves from at least four — no, _five_ people in this room; hello Uncle Nolo, what’s for breakfast?”

“Come on, Curvo, you can’t flag now! You think it’s difficult facing cousin Finrod? Wait till you have to drag yourself and your deeds before Olwe at the Havens!”

“Before the Returned of Doriath!”

“Before the Lady Elwing and her lord!”

“I don’t think she’ll see him at all, do you?”

“That does happen, Curvo.”

“Then you’ll just have to carry those murders with you.”

“Like being in one of the slave-trains of Angband — oh, hello Annatar — only instead of your dead friend, you’re chained to your dead self.”

The gold of Annatar’s eyes had gone nearly opaque, whether in acknowledgement or in recognition of the experience, Celebrimbor could not be sure. Seeing his father in such a reduced state, especially after the care and strength with which Curufin had tended him in Mandos, was a twist in his chest, half joy, half distress.

“Father —” He took his hand; it was thin and cool to the touch. “Father, _why?_ You could have stayed, taken your time to heal…”

Curufin turned a sharp glance on him, no less piercing for the overall air of half-transparency that hung about him. “And leave you alone to face that — your—” He cast his eyes about, looking for Annatar, but there were now a great many people in the room, and the light seemed to hurt his eyes. They closed, his head sank back, and he drew in a slow breath through his lips.

“Is he — sick?” Annatar asked quietly, touching Celebrimbor’s shoulder.

Celebrimbor was not sure how to answer, but Finrod, who had seen many make the journey back to life, stepped in confidently. “Yes and no. He’s between life and death, which is one way of describing sickness, but he’s facing the right direction, as it were. He —”

All at once his speech was suddenly cut off. Always the most expressive of Arafinwë’s children, his face spoke eloquently for him now: recognition, shock, horror and wonder struggling against each other.

“Told you,” murmured Curufin without raising his head. “Brought home — Sauron. Couldn’t leave him. Not…”

“Do you really think he poses a danger to him?” Her husband’s weakened condition had no effect on Laicanis’s evaluation of his statements. “Annatar has told me why he chose to follow our son; that decision was a sound one. And if it was belatedly made, he would hardly be the first person in our family to put passion before judgement.”

Curufin struggled upright so that he could look her in the face. “Laica, do you know what he did to him?”

“I haven’t seen any need to inquire into the details. The chief story that we in Aman have of Sauron is the one recounted in the _Fall of Finrod Felagund—”_

“Hello, Finrod!” interjected Ambarussa, as Laicanis looked over to him in acknowledgement.

“If that’s a specimen of the sort of combat he prefers, I can’t imagine a blow-by-blow account would serve any purpose for either of us.”

“I saw it. Laica, you would feel differently if you’d had to see it; to watch our son being —”

“I’m sure you’re right. I’m glad I didn’t; there’s a freedom in that.”

She offered Curufin neither comfort nor sympathy, knowing he was still too weakened to resist either. Celebrimbor did catch her eye as she looked up to him, pained and evaluative but not betrayed.

“We have also shed blood, Curvo. Should the mothers and fathers of Alqualonde and Doriath grieve less than we?”

“ _Should_ ,” said Curufin through gritted teeth, “has nothing to do with it.”

“No, it doesn’t, does it?” She rested her head against his. “Though I — or you — may understand perfectly well that the suffering of our own child is no more dreadful, and no less, than that of someone else’s, there is a limit to what understanding can do for us. ”

“Ordinarily,” said Finrod, rather too loudly, “I would welcome the opportunity for a spirited discussion of guilt and repentance and right conduct, but I think we need to address the fact that Gorthaur is standing here in this kitchen.”

It might have been the bond between them; it might have been merely how well he had come to know Annatar, but Celebrimbor could swear he heard him swallow, fully formed, _I rather enjoyed our last spirited discussion of guilt and repentance, Felagund._

“I,” said Annatar carefully, “cannot blame you for your grievance against me.”

The kitchen hushed. Fingolfin set down the knife he had been using to chop spring onions, and even Ambarussa ceased their endless banter. Across Nerdanel’s kitchen table they faced each other once again: he who had once been the King of Nargothrond and he who had once been the sorceror of Tol-in-Gaurhoth, the Isle of Werewolves.

This time Celebrimbor was certain that the echoing in his thoughts must spring from his bond with Annatar. He had spoken to him mind-to-mind from the very earliest days of their acquaintance, but this was hardly speech at all: an inchoate frustration and fear, a discord sounding on tight-stretched strings. It resounded through Celebrimbor’s head: _How could I wrong you; it is no wrong to make use of the weaknesses of your nature_ grating against the memory of his own voice; _if you knew, then you know._

“Annatar? Shall we pause for breakfast before going on? We’ve been talking all night on much the same lines,” he added to Finrod.

“As several people in this room can attest, I’m not inexperienced in prolonged questioning,” said Annatar with studied grace. A brief burst of barking laughter shook the twins, and was gone.

“To break bread with Sauron? I sang of this,” said Finrod quietly, almost dreaming, “and did not know what I sang. A world where what was lost might be found, what was marred might be made new…

“Curufin has told me the story as he saw it.” He threw back his head, suddenly savage. “But now I would hear from you, to my face, Gorthaur, for Edrahil and Enedrion and my faithful Ten, for Maechir and Naechir and the garrison at Tol Sirion, for Nargothrond’s beauty broken — _what gives you the right to stand here?”_

Celebrimbor felt Annatar’s mind press suddenly against his own, ungentle in haste, like an urgent request for aid or shelter. The pressure was withdrawn almost immediately. Nothing showed on Annatar’s face, but Finrod looked from one of them to the other, as if he had seen the exchange, and wondered what it meant.

“The sufferance of my husband and his family,” said Annatar. “Nothing else.”

“What gives any of us the right to stand here?” said Laicanis.

“ _I_ certainly wasn’t consulted,” Curufin croaked, from her shoulder.

“The Valar have seen fit to put him in Celebrimbor’s charge,” said Fingolfin, from the table by the hearth, evidently feeling that Finrod was owed a more comprehensive explanation.

“If that satisfies you,” said Annatar.

Finrod considered this and shook his head. “No. That doesn’t matter; I thought it might, but it doesn’t.”

“Then you have grown wiser, prince of the Noldor,” said Annatar, and smiled.

Finrod was not easily angered; the last time Celebrimbor had seen anger like that on his face was in Nargothrond when he dashed his crown to earth. But after a few sharp breaths he drew it back into himself, forced peace and generosity across his features.  

“Why do you believe your anger has no place?” asked Annatar, and the question was genuine. “I wronged you, son of Arafinwë, and for what you suffered at my hands, I am sorry.”

“What _I_ suffered — I was a king, Gorthaur, once, before we met. What of your deeds against my people? What of Barahir my friend?”

“Who?” said Annatar.

“You can’t tell me you don’t _remember_ him,” Finrod hissed. “One of the Ainur, and not remember the deaths that you ordered? He was my friend, Sauron, bound to me by love and oath, blood spared and blood shed. I gave him his land and I owed him my life. You tortured his man to betrayal and you slaughtered him and you made Dorthonion a wasteland, you _must_ remember him.”

Annatar considered. “No, the operation to secure Dorthonion dragged on for years. My people must have cleaned out a dozen nests of outlaws.  He could have been any one of them.” He spoke carefully. “What happened to that country — what I did to that country — was a waste. Was wrong. And for that, Finrod of Nargothrond, I am sorry. But I never knew of a Barahir, and it would be mere flattery to tell you that I did, and repent his death.”

Finrod stood up, nearly knocking his chair over, and abruptly left the room. After a moment Celebrimbor went after him, out onto the terrace, where, if  Finrod had only known it, the King of the Noldor had paced scant hours before, pondering another aspect of the same conundrum. Where the end of the path projected over the water-garden, Finrod crouched, doubled over as if in pain. The high morning sun glittered bright in his bright hair; a strange and bitter contrast to the grief and anger which shone from him as plainly as if they had been light.

“Finrod?”

“If I’d stayed there another minute,” said Finrod through his teeth, “I’d do something that I ought to regret.” There was a quiet, choking sound, that might have been either laughter or tears.

“Finrod, I…”

He looked up, his eyes wild and sadder than Celebrimbor had ever seen them, even at his departure from Nargothrond.

“My brother’s beloved — Saelind, of Beor’s people — there’s something I should like to say to her now. She’s gone, they’re all gone, Beren and Barahir and Beor, but if I could see her again, I would tell her — I know what she meant. _We have fled from the shadow only to find that it is here before us._ Sometimes there just — there isn’t enough to choose hope.”

“Enough of what?” Celebrimbor sat down beside him, and looked down at the water garden.

“I’m not sure. Enough of me, I suppose. I did believe it, Tyelpe. The world where nothing is lost. Where even evil can be turned to good. And I believe it still, I do, but if this is what it means — I can’t accept it.”

He laughed suddenly, though it sounded more like a cry. “Morgoth’s mercy, he’s got me _again,_ how did he get me like this _twice_ , I suppose I should be thankful that this time I had better sense than to try and outsing him. And now? Pinned by my own overreach. Reached for the sword that was too heavy to lift…

“How much harder could it be to forgive Sauron than your father? Sauron only killed me; Curufin betrayed me. And that betrayal still stings, but when I came across your father in the forest, limping toward life like a hart half-bled, that was worth so much more than what he had done. It wasn’t even an effort to pick him up, to help him forward. But Sauron —

“I thought I could do it, you know. I thought I _had_ done it; Curufin told me the story and I thought _this is the first of the good news, the world’s healing has begun in truth._ I came ready to welcome him, and to wish you joy of your union. But all I can see are the wolves, and my people, my people dying for me.”

He dropped his head into his hands. “It’s not that I don’t believe the Valar, don’t believe you, don’t believe that Sauron could turn from Morgoth’s path and become somehow a force for good and not for ill. But that doesn’t _matter._ It ought to matter, I want it to matter, but it doesn’t. No. I can believe it, but I can’t accept it. I could lie and say I forgive him, but that wouldn’t be fair to either of you.”

“Finrod. I’m sorry.”

Finrod shook his head. “You don’t need to be.”

“I don’t mean that I think I’m doing something wrong. I don’t. But I’ve chosen a world that hurts you, and for that I am sorry.”

There was a long pause. “Don’t be. I’m glad — someone could.”

“What will you do?”

“Do?” Finrod reached forward, stirring the water with his hand and watching the fish come forward to nibble at his fingers. “Besides avoid being in the same place as your bridegroom, you mean? Well, I am afraid I will not be breakfasting with you, but beyond that? I don’t know. Give it time, I suppose. I make no promises.”

At this point Curufin would have dropped a double-edged remark about how the making of promises had served them both so far, but Celebrimbor was not his father. “I think,” he said slowly, “that _is_ hope.”

“What do you mean?”

“I hardly know. Sometimes hope looks like a glorious vision, a world made whole, glimpsed for a moment as though through shifting clouds. But I think there are other times when hope doesn’t look like anything at all. Not the certainty of doom, not the promise of healing. And you go on anyway, without that vision. You go on.”

Finrod looked back at him, half in affection and half in wonder. “You have changed, Celebrimbor, since your days in your father’s shadow in Nargothrond.”

 

“Annatar? Are you quite all right?”

It was the end of a long day that had come on the heels of a longer night. Annatar was standing by the window in the guest bedroom, blue and silver in Tilion’s light. He stood so still that the room itself seemed to move in comparison, so still that for a moment he seemed not a living being but an image or a statue. For a moment the question seemed to break over him without registering, then his eyes moved, and he was present once more.

“A little tired, perhaps. Tired as I have not been since returning to Ea, and on few occasions before that either. I could endure centuries beneath the eyes of the Valar, but your kinfolk are exhausting, Tyelperinquar.”

“What we do in these situations,” offered Celebrimbor from where he sprawled on the bed, “is generally to cast ourselves onto the nearest horizontal surface and sleep. I suppose it’s useless asking you, though I still think it would do you good.” Annatar had refused to sleep at all since that strange day in the forest together, when Celebrimbor had woken to find him in tears. He had not previously realized that Annatar was capable of weeping.

“Or, not your kinfolk,” Annatar went on, as if he had not heard of him, “but the extraordinary constraints under which I must interact with them; blindfolded and with both hands bound. It would be much easier, you know, simply to give them what they want, and they would be happier with it as well. Your kind is really frightfully particular, Tyelperinquar.”

“I’m sure I’m going to regret asking, but what do you mean?”

“Your Finrod, for instance. He hardly remembers the harms done himself, and the ones he does remember, he is positively eager to forgive. But those done his companions — for which I will willingly answer to them — are strong in his memory, stronger even than his own desire to believe himself just and merciful.”

Celebrimbor pushed himself up on his elbows. “Annatar. You know why it’s worse to use someone’s love or duty or loyalty to break them and don’t pretend you don’t.”

“More _effective_ , yes, generally; and I acknowledge now that breaking someone’s will harms them. But attachments are one weakness among the web of weaknesses that make up your beings; I don’t see why they’re so much more significant.”

Celebrimbor looked Annatar straight in the eye. “So. You pride yourself on knowing how people can be made to do one thing or another. If someone wanted to control _you_ , to break _your_ will, to make you do what they wanted, how would you suggest they go about it?”

Something changed at the moment when Annatar understood what he was driving at. He went suddenly cold and sharp-edged, like a cat bristling or ice gripping the surface of a lake. He saw his peril with terrible clarity, a vulnerability as acute as that of the Ring. Despite his exhaustion, he gathered power to himself in a sudden rush, eyes flaming to light, hair stirring as if in a sudden wind. In that moment, it seemed, he could have raised the Great Tower or the Pelori themselves. But it was checked; his hands fell useless to his sides. The ordinary channels of defense — dominion, retrenchment, power exercised and maintained — were useless, and he felt their uselessness.

Celebrimbor did not soften. “Do you want me to reassure you? I won’t. This is _what it is_ to love something, Annatar, and don’t believe for a minute it’s different for you than for Finrod, or for Aulë, or for the lowest servant in your empire. This is _why you don’t do that_. This is why you do not turn someone’s love into a tool for your own use.”

“But — _you —”_

Celebrimbor got off the bed, tension vibrating through him. “ _How do you think I won?”_

“Did you not just this minute say,” Annatar returned, the air around him trembling though his voice was as sharp and cold as ever, “that this was an unacceptable form of persuasion?”

“Well, technically you were doing it to yourself. I just pointed it out to you until you noticed that was what you were doing.”

“You don’t understand what I would have done.”

“I’m fairly certain that I do.”

“ _No_. Tyelpe, I saw it. What I would have done to you. I was there. I was smiling.”

The horror was nearly palpable in the air around him. Celebrimbor was reminded of the impossible atom in Aulë’s hand, too heavy to bear up under its own weight. “Oh,” he said softly. “Is _that_ why you won’t sleep?”

“I had not intended to speak of it,” said Annatar tightly.

“Yes, well, as horrifying revelations go I think I’ve learned a few things about dealing with them, and anyway, this, for once, isn’t something that you actually did. There are plenty of horrors in what was without troubling yourself over what might have been.” His voice softened at last. “If that is all it is, then come. Sleep with me.”

“Irmo is a Vala; if it is his will that I dream of –” He could not actually finish the sentence. “He is not wrong.”

“No, wrong is exactly what he is. That isn’t what you chose.”

“It is what I might have chosen.”

“Beloved, who knows that better than I?” He caught Annatar’s hand in his own. “And given that choice, you turned away. If the Powers wish you to suffer, suffer for what you have done, not for what might have been.”

He drew him toward the bed. “You have watched my dreams often enough. Let me watch yours.”

The look that Annatar gave him would have required an entire paragraph in Valarin to describe the types and degrees of refusal, but he did not pull away.

“I am perfectly serious. If Irmo has any accusations he wishes to make on behalf of the futures that did not come to pass, I have told you want I think of them, and I am happy to repeat them to whatever passes for his face.”

He felt Annatar’s laughter through his own chest as Annatar, still careful and coiled, leaned back against him and closed his eyes.

 

Since Aulë’s explanation of Annatar’s grammatical innovations in Valarin, Celebrimbor had been paying particularly close attention whenever his companion slipped into the language of the Powers, piecing together vocabulary, making notes on grammar. Annatar had not taken his eyes from his body that morning, murmuring untranslated endearments all through breakfast. At last, gazing straight into Celebrimbor’s eyes, he pronounced harsh syllables heavy with strange harmonies. He caught the marker for question and the particle of command: a request and a promise together.

“You really are going to have explain that one,” said Celebrimbor, as calmly as he could.

“Or perhaps demonstrate it,” said Annatar.

“He asked you,” said Nerdanel, “if you would pass him the salt.”

“Wait, you understand Valarin?!” cried Celebrimbor.

Annatar was entirely impervious to shame, but not to surprise. “When did you learn the language? I thought none of your people but Fëanor…”

Nerdanel gave him a reproving look. “Fëanor has been dead for more than an age of the earth. He became distracted from his Valarin studies when he took it into his head to create a writing system for it and realized it would be too large to be useful. The last of his notes were attempts at solving some of the problems of his proposed script, such as its danger of setting fire to any surface it was written on. I am less distractible. Over the years I have developed a practical vocabulary for conversing with the Powers.”

“Then you can — all this past morning — What has he been saying to me?” Celebrimbor demanded.

“Nothing,” said Nerdanel with grave diplomacy, “that you would care to have your grandmother repeat to you. He was ennumerating your physical charms. There were numbers involved. Valarin can be astoundingly specific sometimes.”

“Do these notes still exist?” inquired Annatar with interest. “A writing system for Valarin is a futile project, but intriguing in its futility, which seems to be something of a motif with your family.”

“I’m more interested in whether he ever developed a lexicon,” put in Celebrimbor.

Nerdanel laughed. “I see you haven’t gotten very far in that workshop after all. All his Valarin material’s in the gray cloth-bound folios and on the stack of thin metal plates by the far wall, under the scorch mark.”

 

Time in the Blessed Realm passed unmarked save by the internal and interweaving rhythms of learning and healing and labor. Curufin grew stronger, and despite his habit of hissing at Annatar like an angry cat whenever he said something that reminded him of his past, he proved more capable of co-existing with him than Celebrimbor had feared.

“I don’t hate him any less,” said Curufin cheerfully, when his son asked him about it, “but unlike some Arafinwëans whose names I cannot at the moment call to mind, _I’m_ not under any sort of self-imposed regimen of forgiving seven unspeakable things before breakfast.” Laicanis looked from Curufin to Annatar and back again, and laughed behind her hand, and would not explain why.

They began to work again — slowly at first, and tentatively. It reminded Celebrimbor of his time not in Eregion but in Lindon, and he caught Annatar from time to time gazing eastward, as if he could see beyond the mountains to the Sea.

Fingolfin returned occasionally — never in his official capacity, as he took pains to make clear — and would pass long hours in conversation with Annatar, speaking of the state of the Blessed Realm and the rumors of the world without, poring over maps they had assisted him in redrawing. “Arafinwë would be absolutely horrified to learn that I consider you an advisor,” said Fingolfin, “and so I don’t. But it’s good to speak with someone who knows Middle-Earth; what it is to live in a state of constant compromise... You said the Numenoreans were logging as far South as the Enedwaith?”

“Farther by now, most likely,” said Annatar. “The fall of the Tower will have left the South and East in some confusion, and Numenor is a ruler in search of an empire.”

Fingolfin frowned, remembering the Noldor’s own oversupply of kings. “Do you,” he said, turning to Celebrimbor, “know what became of your work? Can you tell whether your Rings are being used as you intended?”

Celebrimbor paused, considered. “No,” he said. “I can’t. It’s strange. I put into them everything that I had; all the art that I possessed. But they’ve passed from me now; I can’t sense them at all. They seem like something in a story that has ended.”

“I don’t imagine,” said Annatar dryly, “their guardians feel the same.”

That was a sobering thought. In those last desperate months he had thought of Gil-Galad and Galadriel principally in terms of the danger they faced and the peril he had placed them in, a peril which had ended, must have ended, when the Ring-Maker of Eregion and his foe perished together.  “ _This world the gods have abandoned…_ ” he said softly. “I suppose I must understand the Lords of the West a little better now. The way they left Middle-Earth to pick up the pieces of their wars. I have done the same thing, and to those who trusted me.”

“Some degree of allowance can probably be made for you,” offered Annatar, “on account of how very dead you were at the time.”

“Death is certainly one excuse for not taking action,” said Fingolfin dryly. “But the world does not stop for it. As I understand, the two of you left rings of power scattered across a continent and a half.”

Celebrimbor paused. “Annatar — the other Rings — do they still _work_?”

“I have not the least idea. I lost that with the One.” Annatar spoke lightly, but his eyes grew distant and troubled. “The One really was the keystone of the Ring-Craft; it was my art and my self and it is gone from me. In that respect, Tyelperinquar, you might justly accuse me of abdication.

“I dare say my old master,” he added, “would take this as an opportunity to draw a lesson on how even doing the right thing provides no assurance of positive consequences; he seems to have recently absorbed this himself and is thus repeating it every chance he gets. I must have heard a dozen different versions of this revelation when I faced him beneath the mountain. He was like an apprentice who has just grasped the concept of non-Endorean geometry.”

“What, you find that revelation less... revelatory?”

Annatar shrugged. “I have spent more than five minutes in Middle-Earth.”

“And your notions of _doing the right thing,_ ” returned Celebrimbor, with an entirely straight face, “were not altogether above critique, as I recall.”

“And that is the point,” said Fingolfin, sober and undeterred. “We don’t get to stop trying. Not while the world lasts.”

 

As the long years turned, in ones and twos their friends began to return from the Halls of the Dead; the people of his city who had fallen at the last stand of Ost-in-Edhil. Celebrimbor counted facing the returned of the Mirdain the most difficult encounters of his renewed life, for they had befriended Annatar and been betrayed by Sauron, and they had died for Celebrimbor’s defiance.

The first of the Masters of the Mirdain to leave Mandos were Alagos and Tirnion, side by side in their return as they had been at their fall. Death did not appear to have altered them at all, neither sobering Tirnion’s flamboyant personality nor moderating Alagos’s contrarian tendencies.

Alagos had gone to Arafinwë’s court to seek out his Amanyar betrothed, who had apparently taken the addition of Tirnion to their household with equanimity. “It’s not every stonemason who needs a bodyguard,” said Tirnion, with palpable relish in recounting the story, “but evidently she has _met_ Alagos, which doubtless gives her a certain tolerance for eccentricity.”

“I’m not surprised.” Celebrimbor retorted. “Having a noble lord of Doriath follow you home is, on the whole, a much more acceptable situation than having Gorthaur the Cruel do likewise.”

On the side of the mountain, where a clear spring rose from the rocks to join the snowmelt from above and rush to the broad slow river in the valley below, the people of Nerdanel’s halls had built a series of bathing-pools, some shallow and sun-warmed, some deep and icy. They were nothing like the great baths of Ost-in-Edhil[5] but recalling Alagos’s love for bathing, Celebrimbor had invited him and Tirnion to pass the afternoon there and take the risk of reacquainting themselves with their old friend and colleague and murderer.

“Why, Annatar!” exclaimed Alagos. “Now I see that III’s tale was true, and you are transformed indeed.” He gestured broadly at the pool in which Annatar was submerged to his chest. “See, Tirnion,” he added, “I told you those robes could come off.”

“Clearly they can come off _now,_ ” returned Tirnion, “but have I passed through death at your side to accept your conclusions without question? He has died himself since we saw him last; this body is as new as yours or mine, and I put forth the hypothesis that he may well have designed the new one in detail more complete than the old, as fitting his requirements.” Here he cast a very insinuating look at Celebrimbor, with a meaningful crook of one perfectly groomed eyebrow.

“Or perhaps he has reconciled with the Lord of Waters and is no longer barred from his domain,” offered Alagos, peeling off his own robes and dropping them in a heap by the pool, “or perhaps he no longer dreads exposure in the physical or metaphysical sense, or is it some third thing? Annatar, do you have anything to say on the subject?”

“I bow to your superior wisdom,” said Annatar dryly, and Celebrimbor had to duck under the water to keep from laughing.

“Are you quite sure you’re all right with this?” he asked, surfacing, looking up at Alagos who appeared to be hesitating at the water’s edge.

“Not in the slightest,” said Alagos cheerfully. “I find the whole idea grips me with a sort of cold horror that radiates outward from the viscera.” He splashed down into the pool. “I must thank you, Sauron — and you too, III. For exposing to me the inconsistencies of my own thought.”

“He is actually serious,” said Tirnion in mock despair. “He was going on about this the whole way here from Arafinwë’s halls. ‘Finally! A real challenge to my commitment to seeking truth wherever it may be found!’”

“I was getting lazy,” Alagos agreed. “Satisfied. Self-contented. It’s fatal to inquiry.”

“He kept trying to get me to press him on the point. ‘Do you mean that you will let me get away with declaring the possibility of reconciliation for some but not for all? Don’t you want me to articulate where I would draw the line?’ I tried explaining to him that I didn’t have particularly friendly feelings toward Annatar either and certainly wouldn’t fault him for feeling the same way—”

“You see? He declares himself my friend,” said Alagos, “and yet seems content to let me stumble along in the darkness of error. Again, I thank you for not allowing me this dangerous ease!” He stared at Annatar, his head cocked on one side, delighted at his own discomfiture.

“I am,” Annatar said carefully, “glad to see you both again.”

“I really am sorry,” said Celebrimbor.

“I don’t think the fault was yours,” Tirnion protested.

“Not for falling in love with Sauron, to be sure,” Alagos agreed, “he was an attractive individual and nobody knew he was Sauron at the time, but in the end III chose Sauron over us, for which I find I do appreciate the apology. There were a number of deaths and a good deal of destruction brought on those who hadn’t chosen to be a part of it..”

“But surely you understand why III would do it?” Tirnion seemed slightly disconcerted to find himself making Sauron’s case, but centuries in Alagos’s company had accustomed him to arguing strange positions. And before the dreadful revelation of Sauron’s identity, Celebrimbor remembered, Tirnion had been frank in his encouragement of his connection to Annatar.

Alagos dashed a handful of water over his face and scrubbed briskly. “Absolutely. And I wouldn’t bar someone from bad choices even if it were in my power; bad choices are frequently educational ones.”

“You’ll understand if I don’t invite you to visit us,” said Tirnion that evening, when they made ready to leave. “As you said, having Gorthaur the Cruel follow one home can be a bit disconcerting, and Alagos’s lady has put up with quite enough already.”

Alagos looked faintly disappointed. “I suppose you’re right.  I was hoping to show you some new designs that I’ve been working on for a bell-tower, but I can bring those with me next time. What?” he added, off Annatar’s look, “of course there will be a next time! Whenever I find myself in need of a bracing dose of moral uncertainty, I will certainly be back.”

 

“Catch,” said Celebrimbor without preamble one evening on the rooftop of the hall, tossing a small shining object toward Annatar. He closed his hand around the flying spark as easily and unhurriedly as if he had been plucking a fruit from a tree, then opened it to find a silver ring, set with three stones; three small lenses in transparent crystal, gathering the light and scattering it again. Annatar looked up at him, stricken, and Celebrimbor held his gaze.

“What…”

“It is the custom of our people, if you will recall, to exchange rings in token of vows of marriage. You have already offered me a ring; I thought it was time to return the gesture.”

Annatar turned the ring between his fingers.

“Nothing more than matter,” Celebrimbor said as he studied it. “Metal and glass. Significant only for what it signifies.”

Annatar would ordinarily have returned with some retort about how Celebrimbor’s attempts at poetry were more elliptical than his lenses and he should stick to saying exactly what he meant, but the ring in his hand stopped his speech. And in silence he stood for several minutes, while the sky turned from orange and gold to deep blue and purple, and the light of the last Silmaril shone low on the Eastern horizon.

“Aulë wept with me,” he said at last. “For the loss of the Ring.”

It was Celebrimbor’s turn to be stricken to silence.  

“He said —well, not _said_ as such, but you know — that he knew what it was to yield the greatest work of your heart. To lose something so precious.”

“Do you,” Celebrimbor said quietly, “miss it?”

Twice Annatar drew breath to answer, and twice reconsidered. “No. That is not an answerable question. The loss was — at the time, the loss was everything. But what I have gained is greater. I saw that, when I spoke with my old master. That when you yield your heart’s labor, what you receive back is not the work itself, but something changed, something greater, something — something that lives.”

“I think,” Celebrimbor said, his voice thick in his throat, “it does matter. Whether you do something for love. It doesn’t mean that it’s the right thing to do. It doesn’t even guarantee that things will turn out right. But at least it means— I don’t know how to say this. That you still exist. Even though you may be destroyed, you still exist.”

“Now you really are getting elliptical,” said Annatar lightly, and Celebrimbor took his hand and set the ring on his finger.

The sky was blue-black now, and the stars shone in it not like single and distant objects, but like a lattice of pinpricks offering a glimpse into a brilliant and illimitable light shining beyond the curtain of the sky.

“How bright the stars are, in Aman!”

“Stars? Look again, Tyelperinquar; you have no excuse now not to see.”

The sky itself wavered, swept aside like a cloth, and when he could see again there were two figures, a woman and a man, standing beside them on the rooftop.

“And here they are,” said Annatar sourly, “the witnesses you called to your vows.”

They were not the forms that Celebrimbor remembered Manwë and Varda wearing when they came among the people of Aman in the great festivals before the Darkening. Indeed, these were hardly forms at all; mere sketches on the surface of the world.

“A breath,” said Manwë.

“A glimmer of light,” said Varda. “Significant only for what it signifies.”

Celebrimbor had not expected to find the Star-Kindler commenting on his word choices, but there was laughter in her starlight. Perhaps there had always been. But Manwë and Varda were not speaking to them, but to each other. He and Annatar seemed to be suddenly included in a conversation that had been going on for a long time, and which only occasionally surfaced into words.

“The Dark Lord is gone,” said Varda.

“Which?”

“Both of them, really.”

Manwë shook his head; clouds rolled and broke against the heights of the Pelori. “The Dark Lord is gone, but the world still suffers. Sorrow and loss eat at the hearts of the Eldar, and fear and greed the hearts of the Edain. The world is better. But it is not - well.”

“It seems that not all its woes can be laid at your feet after all,” said Varda, and cast a sidelong glance at Annatar. Annatar swallowed what would doubtless have been an extensive rebuttal, and Varda laughed as the stars shone through the clouds.

“You see it now,” put in Manwë. “Why the will of the Incarnates is a precious thing, that even we must treat with reverence. Why it is perilous to interfere. Why we cannot just stretch out our hands and fix what is broken.”

Celebrimbor protested. “That doesn’t mean there aren’t ways to make things better. Even for you…. Look at Annatar. We thought he came to us from you. He won our trust, and brought us wisdom, and what he made of us, what we made together…”

“Was shattered, in a few short years, by his own hand?”

Annatar took up the argument, not in his own defense, but for Celebrimbor. “If it had not been a -” He would not, or possibly could not, say the word _lie._ “If I had been in truth your emissary, Lords of the West, would the good to the people of Middle-Earth have been different?”

The stars smiled, colors dancing through the upper airs.

“You speak well, Returned One. Shall I consider the offer as good as made?”

More shapes were resolving around them on the rooftop, more sketches on the surface of reality. This was the Mahanaxar Unseen, the continuous colloquy of the Powers one with another and each with all.

“That is justice,” said Vairë. “Let him redeem in truth the effort he made in falsity.”

“ _What?”_ Celebrimbor demanded.

“We can’t send him to the same people.” That softness in the air must be Este.

“Indeed not, nor should we send him alone.”

“I have servants,” said the twist of light that was Oromë, “as have you, Kementari, that have longed to walk among the peoples of the Hither Shore and speak for the beasts and the growing things, to mend the growing breach before it grows too wide to bridge.”

“This one knows Men and their ways,” said Manwë, “though that knowledge was ill-bought. And he has spoken truly: we have neglected them. Let him return. His life new-gained is not for him alone.”

Annatar’s hand closed on his own. The future was opening before them, half-seen, dizzying with promise.“It goes without saying, I trust,” said Celebrimbor, “that I go wherever he does.”

“It does indeed go without saying, which was why no one said it,” said Yavanna, suddenly sharp and clear against the shifting sky. “If the taste of power prove too sweet to him, who shall check his folly?”

“I am his husband,” put in Celebrimbor, “and not his jailer; I feel this point may have been overlooked—”

A stir of moths, and the voice of Irmo. “Indeed, you do not hesitate to make your opinions clear. I have not forgotten your words to me, little one. If you would have your consort live in which might be rather than what might have been, now is the time for you to prove it.”

“Let them return.” Varda’s words were Valarin, and Celebrimbor knew enough of its nuances now to recognize the language of commission, not command; a charge laid, not permission granted. “Let them return,” echoed the Powers in their many voices.

The shapes of the Valar began to fade, lost in dancing lights like the auroras in the night sky over Araman. Celebrimbor caught flashes of plans and designs, names put forward and rejected, strains of a distant music. But the longing was kindled in him, to see again the world that he had lost, that he had loved. And then he heard Annatar’s voice, strange as those of the greater gods, familiar as his own breath and blood.

“Tyelperinquar. Shall we go back?”

“Not back,” he said, and thought of his mother’s theorem, and the vector that passed unchanged through transformation. “To the world. Together.”

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> 1\. The math-monks of the Vanyar. Laicanis's mathematical interests are highly abstract; the Notenduri's are downright mystical.  
> 2\. Sharpness, acuteness - in other words, acidity.  Annatar is using the Quenya term, which, like that of many earthly languages, is based on the tangible properties of acids, that of their sour/sharp taste and ability to dissolve other things. The first term he uses, in Valarin, refers to their behavior on the molecular level and is in fact nearly synonymous with Celebrimbor’s “giverishness” — a reference to the acidic capability of donating a proton.  
> 3\. This is an eigenvector, which in our world is not actually named after anyone, but is rather derived from the German for “own, proper, inherent, special, or characteristic”. Yanta, though it is the word for ‘bridge’ or ‘yoke’, is also the 35th tengwa, sounded as “y” or “e” in the Mode of Beleriand.  
> 4\. The element Aulë is working on is unbinilium, whose existence despite the best efforts of Joint Institute for Nuclear Research remains purely theoretical.  
> 5\. The baths of Ost-in-Edhil combined the bathing traditions of Elves, Dwarves, and Men, though in Aman Celebrimbor was intrigued to discover that steam-bathing had developed as well, on an entirely separate track from that it had taken in Middle-Earth where it was principally a Dwarvish innovation.


End file.
